SS'^}^ 






-gBl 




Glass. 
Book. 



_- 



Copight^N . 






eu 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSre 



I 



DBOPiPIOP'S ADDRESSES. 



The Greatest Thing in the World. 
Pax Vobiscum. 

The Changed Life. 

"First!"— A Talk with Boys. 
How to Learn How. 

What Is a Christian ? 

The Study of the Bible. 



CHICAGO: 

2>onobue, Ibenneberrs & Co. f 

407-429 DEARBORN STREET. 



( 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF PRO- 
FESSOR DRUMMOND. 



The author of these remarkable addresses 
was born in Scotland in 1851, and studied for 
the University of Edinborough in private schools 
in his native city of Stirling. After gradua- 
tion here he conjinued his studies in Tubin- 
gen, Germany; J$$ eark e»ve signs of special 
promise, and#i# was decided that he should 
enter on the career of the ministry ; and after 
his ordination he was appointed to a mis- 
sion station at Malta. It was in the leisure 
of this rather solitary work that he was ena- 
bled to find time to turn his thoughts more 
entirely to the subject he has since treated 
in lecture and book, although it was not until 
long afterward that these eiforts were made 
public. 



IV BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 

On his return to Scotland he was appointed 
a lecturer in science at the Glasgow Free Church 
College ; and it was at this period that his first 
book, "Natural Law in the Spiritual World/ 1 
made its tremendous sensation, running through 
endless editions at home and abroad and in every 
language. The first edition of this book bears 
the imprint of 1883, and led to his promotion 
to a professorship in the same college. 

The success of the opening address in the 
present volume, when reprinted, was as instan- 
taneous, and even wider, than that of his fim 
book. *• 

Professor Drurrftond* never seemed to have 
been troubled with any absorbing ambition to 
publish his work, and the list of volumes which 
bear his name is small ; at least one of them 
being the result of finding a stenographer's in- 
complete notes printed and for sale in a book- 
store. 

Doubtless part of the secret of his success 
is his simplicity and clearness of style, and 
the fortunate choice of subjects which, at the 
moment of publication, were absorbing the 



OF PROFESSOR DRL'MMOXD. V 

thinking world. He has something to say, 
and knows how to say it, and does so without 
any reference to the number of pages it will 
make, should it ever be put in type. In this 
way he can take up even a commonplace sub- 
ject and discuss it with an original style and 
infuse freshness into it. 

There is no better example of this than the 
first two addresses in this book, the text of 
which is the oft-quoted eulogy of St. Paul's 
for the love that never faileth and the 
promise of Christ of rest for the heavy-laden. 
Many a preacher would hesitate to select these 
well-known sentences for his sermon, but Pro- 
fessor Drummond has found the happy art of 
making them seem like new truths ; and origi- 
nality, after all, is only the art of saying better 
what has been said before. 

Professor Drummond is an ordained minis- 
ter in the Free Church of Scotland, and is 
engaged Sundays, during the University ses- 
sions at Edinborough, in religious w r ork among 
+he students, where his meetings have been 
attended often by as many as five or six hun- 



VI BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 

dred ; and while at home or abroad, his work 
has done much to help the cause of Christian 
living among young men, the University Set- 
tlement School being the outgrowth of his 
words and example. During the week he is 
teaching science from his professor's chair at 
Glasgow, which is a peculiar attachment for a 
divinity school, and one not found in America; 
but scientific study is earnestly pursued in such 
schools in Scotland. 

In the former work he has had as great suc- 
cess as in the latter, and has been the right- 
hand man of the evangelist, Mr. Moody, in 
many of his mass meetings, which shows the 
deep interest he takes in spreading evangelical 
truth. 

Professor Drummond's appearance and man- 
ner are well known in this country ; and, indeed, 
it was at Northfield that the first address in the 
pr2sent volume was delivered. A great scholar 
and divine has given the following analysis of 
the elements of his success : — 

" He has a certain magnetic quality, both as 
a writer and a speaker, but it can be analyzed. 



OF PROFESSOR DRUMMOND. V1H 

Ke has a style, — not a style to move 'the lonely 
rapture of lonely minds, 1 but one which arrests 
the busy crowd, — clear, pleasant, flowing with* 
faint hues of poetry. He is never allusive, supe- 
rior, strained ; he does not condescend ; he is* 
always himself, — a courteous, unaffected gentle- 
man, with a sincere respect for his audience. He 
is an adept in the art of translating scientific 
ideas into common English, and can impart the 
touch that redeems the familiar from platitude. 
Then he has a message, a secret. No one can 
hope long to touch men by mere cleverness or 
rhetorical skill. Can he guide me? conies to be 
the question at last. Those who find the right 
road from the blows they receive on the right 
hand and the left when deviating into wrong 
roads are grateful for a wisdom which comes 
more easily ; and Mr. Drummond is nothing, if 
not practical. He has a system as well as a 
message. The man of one idea is not so pow- 
erful as he used to be. The age dreads nothing 
so much as the Bore, but it does not always dis- 
criminate. But a man with a system, provided 
he is not continuallv rattling the skeleton, is the 



Vlll BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

man of influence. A brilliant preacher of the 
day humorously compares his sermons to little 
heaps of earth flung up by a mole : they made 
a track. In the same way, Mr. Drummond's 
ideas have a continuity. That one-half of his 
scheme of thought is studiously kept out of 
sight does not lessen the interest taken in it ; 
and, like all men whose ideas are coherent, 
he gives the impression of being at peace in 
thought." 



THE GREATEST THING 



THE WORLD. 



"Though I speak with the tongues of men 
and of angels, and have not Love, I am become 
as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And 
though I have the gift of prophecy, and under- 
stand all mysteries, and all knowledge ; and 
though I have all faith, so that I could remove 
mountains, and have not Love, I am nothing. 
And though I bestow all my goods to feed the 
poor, and though I give my body to be burned, 
and have not Love, it profiteth me nothing. 



Love suffereth long, and is kind ; 

Love envieth not ; 

Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, 

Doth not behave itself unseemly, 

Seeketh not her own, 

Is not easily provoked, 

Thinketh no evil ; 
Rejoiceth not in iniquity, 
but rejoiceth in the truth ; 
Beareth all things, believeth all things, 
hopeth all things, 
endureth all things. 



Love " never faileth : but whether there be 
prophecies, they shall fail; whether theie be 
tongues, they shall cease ; whether there be 
knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know 
in part, and we prophesy in part. But when 
that which is perfect is come, then that which 
is in part shall be done away. When I was a 
child, I spake as a child, I understood as a 
child, I thought as a child : but when I became 
a man, I put away childish things. For now we 
see through a glass, darkly ; but then face to 
face : now I know in part ; but then shall I 
know even as also I am known. And now 
abideth faith, hope, Love, these three : but the 
greatest of these is Love." — i Cor. xin. 



THE GREATEST THING 
IN THE WORLD. 



f^VERY one has asked himself the 
^ great question of antiquity as of 
the modern world : What is the sum- 
mum bonum — the supreme good ? You 
have life before you. Once only you 
can live it. What is the noblest object 
of desire, the supreme gift to covet ? 

We have been accustomed to be told 
that the greatest thing in the religious 
world is Faith. That great word has 
been the keynote for centuries of the 



12 THE GREATEST THING 

popular religion; and we have easily 
learned to look upon it as the greatest 
thing in the world. Well, we are- 
wrong. If we have been told that, wo 
may miss the mark. I have taken you, 
in the chapter which I have just read, 
to Christianity at his source ; and there 
we have seen, " The greatest of these 
is love." It is not an oversight. Paul 
was speaking of faith just a moment 
before. He says, " If I have all faith, 
so that I can remove mountains, and 
have not love, I am nothing." So far 
from forgetting he deliberately con- 
trasts them, " Now abideth, Faith, 
Hope, Love," and without a moment's 
hesitation the decision falls, " The 
greatest of these is Love." 



IN THE WORLD. 1 3 

And it is not prejudice. A man is 
apt to recommend to others his own 
strong point. Love was not Paul's 
strong point. The observing student 
can detect a beautiful tenderness grow- 
ing and ripening all through his char- 
acter as Paul gets old; but the hand 
that wrote, " The greatest of these is 
love," when we meet it first, is stained 
with blood. 

Nor is this letter to the Corinthians 
peculiar in singling out love as the 
snmmiun bonitm. The masterpieces 
of Christianity are agreed about it. 
Peter says, " Above all things have 
fervent love among yourselves." Above 
all things. And John goes farther, 
11 God is love." And you remember 



14 THE GREATEST THING 

the profound remark which Paul makes 
elsewhere, " Love is the fulfilling of 
the law." Did you ever think what 
he meant by that ? In those days men 
were working the passage to Heaven 
by keeping the Ten Commandments, 
and the hundred and ten other com- 
mandments which they had manufac- 
tured out of them. Christ said, I will 
show you a more simple way. If you 
do one thing, you will do these hun- 
dred and ten things, without ever 
thinking about them. If you love, you 
will unconsciously fulfill the whole 
law. And you can readily see for 
yourselves how that must be so. Take 
any of the commandments. "Thou 
shalt have no other gods before Me." 



IN THE WORLD. 1 5 

If a man love God, you will not re- 
quire to tell him that. Love is the 
fulfilling of that law. "Take not His 
name in vain." Would he ever dream 
of taking His name in vain if he loved 
him ? " Remember the Sabbath day 
to keep it holy." Would he not be too 
glad to have one day in seven to dedi- 
cate more exclusively to the object of 
his affection? Love would fulfill all 
these laws regarding God. And so, 
if he loved Man, you would never 
think of telling him to honor his father 
and mother. He could not do any- 
thing else. It would be preposterous 
to tell him not to kill. You could only 
insult him if you suggested that he 
should not steal — how could he steal 



1 6 THE GREATEST THING 

from those he loved ? It would be 
superfluous to beg him not to bear false 
witness against his neighbor. If he 
loved him it would be the last thing he 
would do. And you would never 
dream of urging him not to covet what 
his neighbors had. He would rather 
they possessed it than himself. In 
this way " Love is the fulfilling of the 
law." It is the rule for fulfilling all 
rules, the new commandment for keep- 
ing all the old commandments, Christ's 
one secret of the Christian life. 

Now Paul has learned that; and in 
this noble eulogy he has given us the 
most wonderful and original account 
extant of the summum bonum. We 
may divide it into three parts. In the 



IN THE WORLD. I? 

beginning of the short chapter, we 
have Love contrasted ; in the heart of 
it, we have- Love analyzed ; toward the 
end, we have Love defended as the 
supreme gift. 



1 8 THE GREATEST THING 



THE CONTRAST. 



F)AUL begins by contrasting Love 
with other things that men in 
those days thought much of. I shall 
not attempt to go over these things in 
detail. Their inferiority is already 
obvious. 

He contrasts it with eloquence. And 
what a noble gift it is, the power of 
playing upon the souls and wills of 
men, and rousing them to lofty pur- 
poses and holy deeds. Paul says, " If 
I speak with the tongues of men and 
of angels, and have not love, I am 



IN THE WORLD. 1 9 

become as sounding brass, or a tink- 
ling cymbal." And we all know 
why. We have all felt the brazenness 
of words without emotion, the hollow- 
ness, the unaccountable unpersuasive- 
ness, of eloquence behind which lies 
no Love. 

He contrasts it with prophecy. He 
contrasts it with mysteries. He con- 
trasts it with faith. He contrasts it 
with charity. Why is Love greater 
than faith ? Because the end is greater 
than the means. And why is it greater 
than charity ? Because the whole is 
greater than the part. Love is greater 
than faith, because the end is greater 
than the means. What is the use of 
having faith ? It is to connect the soul 



20 THE GREATEST THING 

with God. And what is the object 
of connecting man with God ? That 
he may become like God. But God 
is Love. I Hence Faith, the means, is 
in order to Love, the end. Love, 
therefore, obviously is greater than 
faith. It is greater than charity, 
again, because the whole is greater 
than a part. Charity is only a little 
bit of Love, one of the innumerable 
avenues of Love, and there may even 
be, and there is, a great deal of 
charity without Love, It is a very 
easy thing to toss a copper to a beggar 
on the street ; it is generally an easier 
thing than not to do it. Yet Love is 
just as often in the withholding. We 
purchase relief from the sympathetic 



IN THE WORLD. 21 

feelings roused by the spectacle of 
misery, at the copper's cost. It is too 
c'leap — too cheap for us, and often too 
dear for the beggar. If we really 
1 rved him we would either do more 
for him, or less. 

Then Paul contrasts it with sacrifice 
and martyrdom. And I beg the little 
band of would-be missionaries — and I 
have the honor to call some of you by 
this name for the first time — to remem- 
ber that though you give your bodies 
to be burned, and have not Love, it 
profits nothing — nothing! You can 
take nothing greater to the heathen 
world than the impress and reflection 
of the Love of God upon your own 
character. That is the universal Ian- 



22 THE GREATEST THING 

guage. It will take you years to 
speak in Chinese, or in the dialects of 
India. From the day you land, that 
language of Love, understood by all, 
will be pouring forth its unconscious 
eloquence. It is the man who is the 
missionary, it is not his words. His 
character is his message. In the 
heart of Africa, among the great 
Lakes, I have come across black men 
and women who remembered the only 
white man they ever saw before — 
David Livingstone; and as you cross 
his footsteps in that dark continent, 
men's faces light up as they speak of 
the kind doctor who passed there 
years ago. They could not under- 
stand him ; but they felt the love that 



IN THE WORLD. 23 

beat in his heart. Take into your 
new sphere of labor, where you also 
mean to lay down your life, that sim- 
ple charm, and your lifework must 
succeed. You can take nothing 
greater, you need take nothing less. 
It is not worth while going if you take 
anything less. You may take every 
accomplishment ; you may be braced 
for every sacrifice ; but if you give 
your body to be burned, and have not 
Love, it will profit you and the cause 
of Christ nothing. 



24 THE GREATEST THING 



THE ANALYSIS. 



A FTER contrasting Love with these 
things, Paul, in three verses, 
very short, gives us an amazing an- 
alysis of what this supreme thing is. 
I ask you to look at it. It is a com- 
pound thing, he tells us. It is like 
light. As you have seen a man of 
science take a beam of light and pass 
it through a crystal prism, as you have 
seen it come out on the other side of 
the prism broken up into its component 
colors — red, and blue, and yellow, 
and violet, and orange, and all the 



IN THE WORLD. 2$ 

colors of the rainbow — so Paul passes 
this thing, Love, through the magnifi- 
cent prism £>f his inspired intellect, and 
it comes out on the other side broken 
up into its elements. And in these 
few words we have what one might 
call the Spectrum of Love, the analysis 
of Love. Will you observe what its 
elements are ? Will you notice that 
they have common names; that they 
are virtues which we hear about every 
day ; that they are things w T hich can 
be practiced by every man in every 
place in life ; and how, by a multitude 
of small things and ordinary virtues, 
the supreme thing, the sitmrniim bo?tum 9 
is made up ? 



26 



THE GREATEST THING 



The Spectrum of Love has nine in- 
gredients : 



Patience . . 


. "Love suffereth long." 


Kindness . . 


. "And is kind." 


Generosity 


. "Love envieth not." 


Humility . . 


. " Love vaunteth not itself, 




is not puffed up." 


Courtesy . . 


. " Doth not behave itself 




unseemly." 


Unselfishness 


. "Seeketh not her own." 


Good Temper 


. " Is not easily provoked." 


Guilelessness. 


. "Thinketh no evil." 


Sincerity . . 


. "Rejoiceth not in iniquity, 




but rejoiceth in the 




truth." 



Patience ; kindness ;• generosity ; 
humility ; courtesy ; unselfishness ; 
good temper ; guilelessness ; sincerity 
« — these make up the supreme gift, the 



IN THE WORLD. 2*] 

stature of the perfect man. You will 
observe that all are in relation to men, 
in relation to life, in relation to the 
known to-day and the near to-morrow, 
and not to the unknown eternity. We 
hear much of love to God ; Christ 
spoke much of love to man. We 
make a great deal of peace with 
heaven ; Christ made much of peace 
on earth. Religion is not a strange or 
added thing, but the inspiration of the 
secular life, the breathing of an eternal 
spirit through this temporal world. 
The supreme thing, in short, is not a 
thing at all, but the giving of ( a further 
finish to the multitudinous words and 
acts which make up the sum of every 
common day. 



28 THE GREATEST THING 

There is no time to do more than 
make a passing note upon each of 
these ingredients. Love is Patience. 
This is the normal' attitude of Love; 
Love passive, Love waiting to begin ; 
not in a hurry ; calm ; ready to do it^ 
work when the summons^ comes, but 
meantime wearing the ornament of a 
meek and quiet spirit. Love suffers 
long ; beareth all things ; believeth al 1 
things ; hopeth all things. For_Lovfc 
understands, and therefore waits. 

Kindness. Love active. Have vou 
ever noticed how much of Christ's life 
was spent in doing kind things — in 
\j merely doing kind things ? Run over it 
with that in view, and you will find that 
He spent a great proportion of His 



IN THE WORLD. 29 

time simply in making people happy, 
in doing good turns to people. There 
is only one thing greater than happi- 
ness in the world, and that is holiness ; 
and it is not in our keeping ; but what 
God has put in our power is the hap- 
piness of those about us, and that is 
largely to be secured by our being 
kind to them. 

"The greatest thing." says some 
one, "a man can do for his Heavenly 
Father is to* be kind to some of His 
other children." I wonder why it is 
that we are not all kinder than we are ? 
How much the world needs it. How 
easily it is done. How instantaneously 
it acts. How infallibly it is remem- 
bered. How superabundantly it pays 



30 THE GREATEST THING 

itself back — for there is no debtor in 
the world so honorable, so superbly 
honorable, as Love. " Love never 
faileth." Love is success, Love is 
happiness, Love is life. " Love I 
say," with Browning, "is energy of 
Life." 

" For life, with all it yields of joy or woe 
And hope and fear, 
Is just our chance o' the prize of learning 

love, — 
How love might be, hath been indeed, 

and is." 

Where Love is, God is. He that 
dwelleth in Love dwelleth in God. 
God is Love. Therefore love. Without 
distinction, without calculation, without 
procrastination, love. Lavish it upon 
the poor, where it is very easy ; espe- 



IN THE WORLD. 3 1 

cial ly upon the rich, who often need it 
most; most of all upon our equals, 
where it is very difficult, and for whom 
perhaps we each do least of all. 
There is a difference between trying 
to please and giving pleasure. Give 
pleasure. Lose no chance of giving 
pleasure. For that is the ceaseless 
and anonymous triumph of a truly 
loving spirit. " I shall pass through 
this world but once. Any good thing 
therefore that I can do, or any kind- 
ness that I can show to any human 
being, let me do it now. Let me not 
defer it or neglect it, for I shall not 
pass this way again." 

Generosity. " Love envieth not." 
This is love in competition with others. 



32 THE GREATEST THING 

Whenever you attempt a good work 
you will find other men doing the same 
kind of work, and probably doing it 
better. Envy them not. Envy is a 
feeling of ill-will to those who are in 
the same line as ourselves, a spirit of 
covetousness and detraction. How lit- 
tle Christian work even is a protection 
against un-Christian feeling. That 
most despicable of all the unworthy 
moods which cloud a Christian's soul 
assuredly waits for us on the threshold 
of every work, unless we are fortified 
with this grace of magnanimity. Only 
one thing truly need the Christian 
envy, the large, rich, generous soul 
which " envieth not." 

And then, after having learned all 



IN THE WORLD. 33 

that, you have to learn this further 
thing, (Humility — to put a seal upon 
your lips and forget what you have 
done. / After you have been kind, after 
Love has stolen forth into the world 
and done its beautiful work, go back 
into the shade again and say nothing 
about it. Love hides even from itself. 
Love waives even self-satisfaction. 
" Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed 
up." 

The fifth ingredient is a somewhat 
strange one to find in this summum 
bonum : Courtesy. This is Love in 
society, Love in relation to etiquette. 
" Love does not behave itself unseem- 
ly." Politeness has been defined as 
love in trifles. Courtesy is said to be 



^4 THE GREATEST THING 

love in little things. And the one 
secret of politeness is to love. Love 
cannot behave itself unseemly. You 
can put the most untutored persons 
into the highest society, and if they 
have a reservoir of Love in their heart 
they will not behave themselves un- 
seemly. They simply cannot do it. 
Carlisle said of Robert Burns that 
there was no truer gentleman in Europe 
than the ploughman-poet. It was 
because he loved everything — the 
mouse, and the daisy, and all the 
things, great and small, that God had 
made. So with this simple passport 
he could mingle with any society, and 
enter courts and palaces from his little 
cottage on the banks of the Ayr. You 



IN THE WORLD. 35 

know the meaning of the word " gen- 
tleman." It means a gentle man — a 
man who does things gently with love. t\P 
And that is the whole art and mystery 
of it. The gentle man cannot in the 
nacure of things do an ungentle, an 
ungentlemanly thing. The ungentle 
soul, the inconsiderate, unsympathetic 
nature, cannot do anything else. 
" Love doth not behave itself un- 
seemly." 

Unselfishness. " Love seeketh not 
her own." Observe : Seeketh not 
even that which is her own. In Brit- 
ain the Englishman is devoted,, and 
rightly, to his rights. But there come 
times when a man may exercise even 
the higher right of giving up his rights. 



36 THE GREATEST THING 

Yet Paul does not summon us to give 
up our rights. Love strikes much 
deeper. It would have us not seek 
them at all, ignore them, eliminate the 
personal element altogether from our 
calculations. It is not hard to give up 
our rights. They are often eternal. 
The difficult thing is to give up our- 
selves. The more difficult thing still 
is not to seek things for ourselves at 
all. After we have sought them, 
bought thep, won them, deserved 
them, we have taken the cream off 
them for ourselves already. Little 
cross then to give them up. But not 
to seek them, to look every man not 
on his own things, but on the things of 
others — id opus est. " Seekest thou 



IN THE WORLD. 37 

great things for thyself," said the 
prophet; "seek them not." Why? 
(^Because there is no greatness in tilings. 
Things cannot be great. The only 
greatness is unselfish love. Even self- 
denial in itself is nothing, is almost a 
mistake. Only a great purpose or a 
mightier love can justify the waste.. 
It is more difficult, I have said, not to 
seek our own at all, than, having 
sought it, to give it up. I must take 
that back. It is only true of a partly 
selfish heart. Nothing is a hardship 
to Love, and nothing is hard. I be- 
lieve that Christ's " yoke " is easy. 
Christ's yoke is just his way of taking 
life. And I believe it is an easier 
way than any other. I believe it is a 



38 THE GREATEST THING 

happier way than any other. The 
most obvious lesson in Christ's teach- 
ing is that there is no happiness in 
having and getting anything, but only 
in giving. I repeat, there is no happi- 
ness in having or in getting, but only in 
giving. And half the world is on the 
wrong scent in pursuit of happiness. 
They think it consists in having and 
getting, and in being served by others. 
It consists in giving, and in serving 
others. He that would be great among 
you, said Christ, let him serve. He 
that would be happy, let him remem- 
ber that there is but one way — it is 
more blessed, it is more happy, to give 
than to receive. 

The next ingredient is a very re- 



IN THE WORLD. 39 

markable one : Good temper. " Love 
is not easily provoked." Nothing could 
be more striking than to find this 
here. We are inclined to look upon 
bad temper as a very harmless weak- 
ness. We speak of it as a mere in- 
firmity of nature, a family failing, a 
matter of temperament, not a thing to 
take into very serious account in esti- 
mating a man's character. And yet 
here, right in the heart of this analysis 
of love, it finds a place ; and the Bible 
again and again returns to condemn it 
as one of the most destructive elements 
in human nature. 

The peculiarity of ill temper is that 
it is the vice of the virtuous. It 
is often the one blot on an otherwise 



40 THE GREATEST THING 

noble character. You know men who 
are all but perfect, and women who 
would be entirely perfect, but for 
an easily ruffled, quick-tempered, or 
"touchy" disposition. This compati- 
bility of ill temper with high moral 
character is one of the strangest and 
saddest problems of ethics. The truth 
is there are two great classes of sins — 
sins of the Body, and sins of the Dis- 
position. The Prodigal Son may be 
taken as a type of the first, the Elder 
Brother of the second. Now, society 
has no doubt whatever as to which of 
these is the worse. Its brand falls, 
without a challenge, upon the Prodigal. 
But are we right? We have no bal- 
ance to weigh one another's sins, and 



IN THE WORLD. 4 1 

coarser and finer are but human words ; 
but faults in the higher nature may be 
less venial than those in the lower, 
and to the eye of Him who is Love, a 
sin against Love may seem a hundred 
times more base. No form of vice, 
not worldliness, not greed of gold, not 
drunkenness itself, does more to un- 
Christianize society than evil temper. 
For embittering life, for breaking up 
communities, for destroying the most 
sacred relationships, for devastating 
homes, for withering up men and 
women, for taking the bloom of child- 
hood, in short, for sheer gratuitous 
misery-producing power, this influence 
stands alone. Look at the Elder 
Brother, moral, hard-working, patient, 



42 THE GREATEST THING 

dutiful — let him get all credit for his 
virtues — look at this man, this baby, 
sulking outside his own father's door. 
'■ He was angry," we read, " and 
would not go in." Look at the effect 
upon the father, upon the servants, 
upon the happiness of the guests. 
Judge of the effect upon the Prodigal 
— and how many prodigals are kept 
out of the Kingdom of God by the un- 
lovely character of. those who profess 
to be inside ? Analyze, as a study in 
Temper, the thunder-cloud itself as it 
gathers upon the Elder Brother's brow. 
What is it made of ? Jealousy, anger, 
pride, uncharity, cruelty, self-right- 
eousness, touchiness, doggedness, sul- 
lenness — these are the ingredients of 



IN THE WORLD. 43 

cms dark and loveless soul. In vary- 
ing proportions, also, these are the in- 
gredients of all ill temper. Judge if 
such sins of the disposition are not 
worse to live in, and for others to live 
with, than sins of the body. Did 
Christ indeed not answer the question 
Himself when He said, " I say unto 
you, that the publicans and the harlots 
go into the Kingdom of Heaven before 
you." There is really no place in 
Heaven for a disposition like this. A 
man with such a mood could only 
make Heaven miserable for all the 
people in it. Except, therefore, such 
a man be born again, he cannot, he 
simply cannot, enter the Kingdom of 
Heaven. For it is perfectly certain-- 



44 THE GREATEST THING 

and you will not misunderstand me - 
that to enter Heaven a man must take 
it with him. 

You will see then why Temper is 
significant. It is not in what it is 
alone, but in what it reveals. This 
is why I take the liberty now of speak- 
ing of it with such unusual plainness. 
It is a test for love, a symptom, a reve- 
lation of an unloving nature at bottom. 
It is the intermittent fever which be- 
speaks unintermittent disease within ; 
the occasional bubble escaping to the 
surface which betrays some rottenness 
underneath ; a sample of the most hid- 
den products of the soul dropped in- 
voluntarily when off one's guard ; in a 
word, the lightning form of a hundred 



IN THE WORLD. 45 

hideous and un-Christian sins. For a 
want of patience, a want of kindness, 
a want of generosity, a want of cour- 
tesy, a want of unselfishness, are all 
instantaneously symbolized in one flash 
of Temper. 

Hence it is not enough to deal with 
the Temper. We must go to the 
source, and change the inmost nature, 
and the angry humors will die away 
of themselves. Souls are made sweet 
not by taking the acid fluids out, but 
by putting something in — a great 
Love, a new Spirit, the Spirit of 
Christ. Christ, the Spirit of Christ, 
interpenetrating ours, sweetens, puri- 
fies, transforms all. This only can 
eradicate what is wrong, work a chem- 



46 THE GREATEST THING 

ical change, renovate and regenerate, 
and rehabilitate the inner man. Will- 
power does not change men. Time 
does not change men. Christ does. 
Therefore " Let that mind be in you 
which was also in Christ Jesus." 
Some of us have not much time tG 
lose. Remember, once more, that 
this is a matter of life or death. I 
cannot help speaking urgently, for 
myself, for yourselves. " Whoso shall 
offend one of these little ones, which 
believe in me, it were better for him 
that a millstone were hanged about his 
neck, and that he were drowned in the 
depth of the sea." That is to say, it 
is the deliberate verdict of the Lord 
Jesus that it is better not to live than 



IN THE WORLD. 47 

not to love. It is better not to live than 
not to love. 

Guilelessness and Sincerity may be 
dismissed almost without a word. 
Guilelessness is the grace for suspi- 
cious people. And the possession of 
it is the great secret of personal influ- 
ence. You will find, if you think for a 
moment, that the people who influence 
you are people who believe in you. 
In an atmosphere of suspicion men 
shrivel up ; but in that atmosphere 
they expand, and find encouragement 
and educative fellowship. It is a won- 
derful thing that here and there in this 
hard, uncharitable world there should 
still be left a few rare souls who think 
no evil. This is the great unworldli- 



48 THE GREATEST THING 

ness. Love "thinketh no evil," im- 
putes no motive, sees the bright side, 
puts the best construction on every 
action. What a delightful state of 
mind to live in ! What a stimulus and 
benediction even to meet with it for 
a day ! To be trusted is to be saved. 
And if we try to influence or elevate 
others, we shall soon see that success 
is in proportion to their belief of our 
belief in them. For the respect of 
another is the first restoration of the 
self-respect a man has lost; our ideal 
of what he is becomes to him the hope 
and pattern of what he may become. 
" Love rejoiceth not in iniquity, but 
rejoiceth in the truth." I have called 
this Sincerity from the wcrd^ rendered 



IN THE WORLD. 49 

in the Authorized Version by " re- 
joiceth in the truth." And, certainly, 
were this the real translation, nothing- 
could be more just. For he who 
loves will love Truth not less than 
men. He will rejoice in the Truth — 
rejoice not in what he has been taught 
to believe; not in this Church's doc- 
trine or in that ; not in this ism or in 
that ism; but "An the Truth." He 
will accept only what is real ; he will 
strive to get at facts; he will search 
for Truth with a humble and unbiassed 
mind, and cherish whatever he finds 
at any sacrifice. But the more literal 
translation of the Revised Version 
calls for just such a sacrifice for 
truths sake here. For what Paul 



50 THE GREATEST THING 

really meant is, as we there read, 
" Rejoiceth not in unrighteousness, but 
rejoiceth with the truth," a quality 
which probably no one English word 
— and certainly not Sincerity — ade- 
quately defines. It includes, perhaps 
more strictly, the self-restraint which 
refuses to make capital out of others' 
faults; the charity which delights not 
in exposing the weakness of others, 
but " covereth all things ; " the sin- 
cerity of purpose which endeavors to 
see things as they are, and rejoices to 
find them better than suspicion feared 
or calumny denounced. 

So much for the analysis of Love. 
Now the business of our lives is to 
have these things fitted into our char- 



IN THE WORLD. 5 1 

r 
acters. (That is the supreme work to 

which we need to address ourselves in 
this world, to learn Love. Is life not 
full of opportunities for learning Love ? 
Every man and woman every day has 
a thousand of them. The world is 
not a playground ; it is a schoolroom. 
Life is not a holiday, but an educa- 
tion. And the one eternal lesson for 
us all is how better we can love. What 
makes a man a good cricketer ? Prac- 
tice. What makes a man a good 
artist, a good sculptor, a good musi- 
cian ? Practice. What makes a man 
a good linguist, a good stenographer? 
Practice. What makes a man a good 
man ? Practice. Nothing else. There 
is nothing capricious about religion. 



$2 t::z greatest thing 

We do not get the soul in different 
ways, under different laws, from those 
in which we get the body and the 
mind. If a man does not exercise his 
arm he develops no biceps muscle ; 
and if a man does not exercise his 
soul, he requires no muscle in his soul, 
no strength of character, no vigor of 
moral fibre, nor beauty of spiritual 
growth. Love is not a thing of enthu- 
siastic emotion. It is a rich, strong, 
manly, vigorous expression of the 
whole round Christian character — the 
Christlike nature in its fullest develop- 
ment. And the constituents of this 
great character are only to be built up 
by ceaseless practice. 

What was Christ doing in the car- 



IN THE WORLD. 53 

penter's shop ? Practicing. Though 
perfect, we read that He learned obe- 
dience, and grew in wisdom and in 
favor with God. Do not quarrel there- 
fore with your lot in life. Do not com- 
plain of its neverceasing cares, its 
petty environment, the vexations you 
have to stand, the small and sordid 
souls you have to live and work with. 
Above all, do not resent temptation ; 
do not be perplexed because it seems 
to thicken round you more and more, 
and ceases neither for effort nor for 
agony nor prayer. That is your prac- 
tice. That is the practice which God 
appoints you ; and it is having its work 
in making you patient, and humble, 
and generous, and unselfish, and kind, 



54 THE GREATEST THING 

and courteous. Do not grudge the 
hand that is moulding the still too 
shapeless image within you. It is 
growing more beautiful, though you 
see it not, and every touch of tempta- 
tion may add to its perfection. There- 
fore keep in the midst of life. Do not 
isolate yourself. Be among men, and 
among things, and among troubles, 
and difficulties, and obstacles. You 
remember Goethe's words : Es bildet 
ein Talent sich in der Stille, Dock ein 
Charakter in dem Strom der Welt. 
" Talent develops itself in solitude ; 
character in the stream of life." Tal- 
ent develops itself in solitude — the 
talent of prayer, of faith, of meditation, 
of seeing the unseen ; character grows 



IN THE WORLD. 55 

in the stream of the world's life. That 
chiefly is where men are to learn love. 
How ? Now, how ? To make it 
easier, I have named a few of the ele- 
ments of love. But these are only 
elements. Love itself can never be 
defined. Light is a something more 
than the sum of its ingredients — a 
glowing, dazzling, tremulous ether. 
And love is something more than all 
its elements — a palpitating, quivering, 
sensitive, living thing. By synthesis 
of all the colors, men can make white- 
ness, they cannot make light. By 
synthesis of all the virtues, men can 
make virtue, they cannot make love. 
How then are we to have this tran- 
scendent living whole conveyed into 



50 THE GREATEST THING 

our souls ? We brace our wills to 
secure it. We try to copy those who 
have it. We lay down rules about it. 
We watch. We pray. But these 
things alone will not bring love into 
our nature. Love is an effect. And 
only as we fulfill the right condition 
can we have the effect produced. 
Shall I tell you what the cause is ? 

If you turn to the Revised Version 
of the First Epistle of John you will 
find these words: "We love because 
He first loved us." "We love," not 
"We love Him." That is the way 
the old version has it, and it is quite 
wrong. " We love — because He first 
loved us." Look at that word " be- 
cause." It is the cause of which I have 



IN THE WORLD. 57 

spoken. " Because He first loved us," 
the effect follows that we love, we love 
Him, we love all men. We cannot 
help it. Because He loved us, we 
love, we love everybody. Our heart 
is slowly changed. Contemplate the 
love of Christ, and you will love. 
Stand before that mirror, reflect 
Christ's character, and you will be 
changed into the same image from 
tenderness to tenderness. There is no 
other way. You cannot love to order. 
You can only look at the lovely object, 
and fall in love with it, and grow into 
likeness to it. And so look at this 
Perfect Character, this Perfect Life. 
Look at the great Sacrifice as He laid 
down Himself, all through life, and 



$8 THE GREATEST THING 

upon the Cross of Calvary ; and you 
must love Him. And loving Him, 
you must become like Him. Love 
begets lovo. It is a process of induc- 
tion. Put a piece of iron in the 
presence of an electrified body, and 
that piece of iron for a time becomes 
electrified. It is changed into a tem- 
porary magnet in the mere presence 
of a permanent magnet, and as long 
as you leave the two side by side, they 
are both magnets alike. Remain side 
by side with Him who loved us, and 
gave Himself for us, and you too will 
become a permanent magnet, a per- 
manently attractive force ; and like 
Him you will draw all men unto you, 
like Him you will be drawn unto all 



IN THE WORLD. 59 

men. That is the inevitable effect of 
Love. Any man who fulfills that 
cause must have that effect produced 
in him. Try to give up the idea that 
religion comes to us by chance, or by 
mystery, or by caprice. It comes to 
us by natural law, or by supernatural 
law, for all law is Divine. Edward 
Irving went to see a dying boy once, 
and when he entered the room he just 
put his hand on the sufferer's head, and 
said, " My boy, God loves you," and 
went away. And the boy started from 
his bed, and called out to the people 
in the house, " God loves me ! God 
loves me ! " It changed that boy. The 
sense that God loved him overpowered 
him, melted him down, and began the 



60 THE GREATEST THING 

creating of a new heart in him. And 
that is how the love of God melts down 
the unlovely heart in man, and begets 
in him the new creature, who is patient 
and humble and gentle and unselfish. 
And there is r*o other way to get it. 
There is no mystery about it. We 
love others, we love everybody, we 
love our enemies, because He first 
loved us. 



IN THE WORLD. 6l 



THE DEFENCE, 



\TOW I have a closing sentence or 
two to add about Paul's reason 
for singling out love as the supreme 
possession. It is a very remarkable 
reason. In a single word it is this : it 
lasts. "Love," urges Paul, "never 
faileth." Then he begins again one 
of his marvelous lists of the great 
things of the day, and exposes them 
one by one. He runs over the things 
that men thought were going to last, 
and shows that they are all fleeting, 
temporary, passing away. 



62 THE GREATEST THING 

•'Whether there be prophecies, they 
shall fail." It was the mother's am- 
bition for her boy in those days that 
he should become a prophet. For hun- 
dreds of years God had never spoken 
by means of any prophet, and at that 
time the prophet was greater than 
the King. Men waited wistfully for 
another messenger to come, and hung 
upon his lips when he appeared as 
upon the very voice of God. Paul 
says, " Whether there be prophecies, 
they shall fail." This book is full of 
prophecies. One by one they have 
; ' failed ; " that is, having been fulfilled 
their work is finished; they have 
nothing more to do now in the world 
except to feed a devout man's faith. 



IN THE WORLD. 03 

Then Paul talks about ungues. 
That was another thing that was greatly 
coveted. ''Whether there be tongues, 
they shall cease." As we all know, 
many, many centuries have passed 
since tongues have been known in this 
world. They have ceased. Take it 
in any sense you like. Take it, for 
illustration merely, as languages in 
general — a sense which was not in 
Paul's mind at all, and which though 
it cannot give us the specific lesson 
will point the general truth. Consider 
the words in which these chapters were 
written — Greek. It has gone. Take 
the Latin — the other great tongue 
of those days. It ceased long ago. 
Look at the Indian language. It is 



64 THE GREATEST THING 

ceasing. The language of Wales, ot 
Ireland, of the Scottish Highlands is 
dying before our eyes. The most 
popular book in the English tongue at 
the present time, except the Bible, is 
one of Dickens's works, his Pickwick 
Papas. It is largely written in the 
language of London street-life; and 
experts assure us that in fifty years X 
will be unintelligible to the average 
English reader. 

Then Paul goes farther, and with 
even greater boldness adds, " Whether 
there be knowledge, it shall vanish 
away." The wisdom of the ancients, 
where is it ? It is wholly gone. A 
schoolboy to-day knows more than Sit 
Isaac Newton knew. His knowledge 



IN THE WORLD. 65 

has vanished away. You put yester- 
day's newspaper in the fire. Its 
knowledge has vanished away. You 
buy the old editions of the great ency- 
clopaedias for a few pence. Their 
knowledge has vanished away. Look 
how the coach has been superseded by 
the use of steam. Look how elec- 
tricity has superseded that, and swept 
a hundred almost new inventions into 
oblivion. One of the greatest living 
authorities, Sir William Thompson, 
said the other day, "The steam-engine 
is passing away." "Whether there 
be knowledge, it shall vanish away." 
At every workshop you will see, in 
the back yard, a heap of old iron, a 
few wheels, a few levers, a few cranks, 



66 THE GREATEST THING 

broken and eaten with rust. Twenty 
years ago that was the pride of the 
city. Men flocked in from the country 
to see the great invention ; now it is 
superseded, its day is done. And all 
the boasted science and philosophy of 
this day will soon be old. But yester- 
day, in the University of Edinburgh, 
the greatest figure in the faculty was 
Sir James Simpson, the discoverer of 
chloroform. The other day his suc- 
cessor and nephew, Professor Simp- 
son, was asked by the librarian of the 
University to go to the library and 
pick out the books on his subject that 
were no longer needed. And his re- 
ply to the librarian was this : *' Take 
every text-book that is more than ten 



IN THE WORLD. 6%' 

years old, and put it down in the cel- 
lar." Sir James Simpson was a great 
authority only a few years ago : mem 
came from all parts of the earth tcr 
consult him ; and almost the whole 
teaching of that time is consigned by 
the science of to-day to oblivion. And 
in every branch of science it is the. 
same. " Now w T e know in part. We 
see through a glass darkly." 

Can you tell me anything that is 
going to last? Many things Paul did 
not condescend to name. He eld not 
mention money, fortune, fame ; but he 
picked out the great things of his time, 
the things the best men thought had 
something in them, and brushed them 
peremptorily aside. Paul had no 



68 THE GREATEST THING 

charge against these things in them- 
selves. All he said about them was 
that they would not last. They were 
great things, but not supreme things. 
There were things beyond them. 
What we are stretches past what we 
do, beyond what we possess. Many 
things that men denounce as sins are 
not sins ; but they are temporary. 
And that is a favorite argument of 
the New Testament. John says of the 
world, not that it is wrong, but simply 
that ii: "passeth away." There is a 
great deal in the world that is delight- 
ful and beautiful ; there is a great deal 
in it that is great and engrossing; but 
it will not last. All that is in the 
world, the lust of the eye, the lust of 



IN THE WORLD. 69 

the flesh, and the pride of life, are but 
for a little while. Love not the world 
therefore. Nothing that it contains 
is worth the life and consecration of 
an immortal soul. The immortal soul 
must give itself to something that is 
immortal. And the only immortal 
things are these : " Now abideth faith, 
hope, love, but the greatest of these is 
love." 

Some think the time may come when 
two of these three things will also pass 
away — faith into sight, hope into fru- 
ition. Paul does not say so. We 
know but little now about the condi- 
tions of the life that is to come. But 
what is certain is that Love must last. 
God, the Eternal God, is Love. Covet 



*JO THE GREATEST THING 

therefore that everlasting gift, that one 
thing which it is certain is going to 
stand, that one coinage which w T ill be 
current in the Universe when all the 
other coinages of all the nations of the 
world shall be useless and unhonored. 
You will give yourselves to many 
things, give yourself first to Love. 
Hold things in their proportion. Hold 
things in their proportion. Let at least 
the first great object of our lives be 
to achieve the character defended in 
these words, the character — and it is 
the character of Christ — w r hich is built 
round Love. 

I have said this thing is eternal. 
Did you ever notice how continually 
John associates love and faith with 



IN THE WORLD. 7 1 

eternal life? I was not told when I 
was a boy that " God so loved the 
world that He gave His only-begotten 
Son, that whosoever believeth in Him 
should have everlasting life." What 
I was told, I remember, was, that God 
so loved the world that, if I trusted in 
Him, I was to have a thing called 
peace, or I was to have rest, or I was 
to have joy, or I was to have safety. 
But I had to find out for myself that 
whosoever trusteth in Him — that is, 
whosoever loveth Him, for trust is only 
the avenue to Love — hath everlasting 
life. The Gospel offers a man life. 
Never offer men a thimbleful of Gos- 
pel. Do not offer them merely joy, 
or merely peace, or merely rest, or 



72 THE GREATEST THING 

merely safety ; tell them how Christ 
came to give men a more abundant 
life than they have, a life abundant in 
love, and therefore abundant in salva- 
tion for themselves, and large in enter- 
prise for the alleviation and redemption 
of the world. Then only can the 
Gospel take hold of the whole of a 
man, body, soul, and spirit, and give 
to each part of his nature its exercise 
and reward. Many of the current 
Gospels are addressed only to a part 
of man's nature. They offer peace, 
not life; faith, not Love ; justification, 
not regeneration. And men slip back 
again from such religion because it 
has never really held them. Their 
nature was not all in it. It offered no 



IN THE WORLD. 73 

deeper and gladder life-current than 
the life that was lived before. Surely 
it stands to reason that only a fuller 
love can compete with the love of the 
world. 

To love abundantly is to live abun- 
dantly, and to love forever is to live 
forever. Hence, eternal life is inex- 
tricably bound up with love, We 
v/ant to live forever for the same rea- 
son that we want to live to-morrow. 
Why do you want to live to-morrow r* 
It is because there is some one who 
loves you, and whom you want to see 
to-morrow, and be with, and love 
back. There is no other reason why 
we should live on than that we love 
and are beloved. It is when a man 



74 THE GREATEST THING 

has no one to love him that he com- 
mits suicide. So long as he has 
friends, those who love him and whom 
he loves, he will live, because to live 
is to love. Be it but the love of a dog, 
it will keep him in life ; but let that 
go and he has no contact with life, no 
reason to live. He dies by his own 
hand. Eternal life also is to know 
God, and God is love. This is Christ's 
own definition. Ponder it. "This is 
life eternal, that they might know Thee 
the only true God, and Jesus Christ 
whom Thou has sent." Love must be 
eternal. It is what God is. On the 
last analysis, then, love is life. Love 
never faileth, and life never faileth, so 
long as there is love. That is the 



IN THE WORLD. /5 

philosophy of what Paul is showing us ; 
the reason why in the nature of things 
Love should be the supreme thing — 
because it is going to last; because in 
the nature of things it is an Eternal 
Life. It is a thing that we are liv- 
ing now, not that we get when we die ; 
that we shall have a poor chance of 
getting when we die unless we are 
living now. No worse fate can befall 
a man in this world than to live and 
grow old alone, unloving, and unloved. / 
To be lost is to live in an unregenerate 
condition, loveless and unloved ; and 
to be saved is to love; and he that 
dwelleth in love dwelleth already in 
God. For God is Love. 

Now I have all but finished. How 



many of you will join me in reading 
this chapter once a week for the next 
chree months ? A man did that once 
and it changed his whole life. Will 
you do it ? It is for the greatest thing 
in the world. You might begin by 
reading it every day, especially the 
verses which describe the perfect char- 
acter. " Love suffereth long, and is 
kind ; love envieth not ; love vaunteth 
not itself." Get these ingredients into 
your life. Then everything that you 
do is eternal. It is worth doing. It 
is worth giving time to. No man can 
become a saint in his sleep ; and to 
fulfill the condition required demands 
a certain amount of prayer and medi- 
tation and time, just as improvement 



IN THE WORLD. 7/ 

in any direction, bodily or mental, re- 
quires preparation and care. Address 
yourselves to that one thing ; at any 
cost have this transcendent character 
exchanged for yours. You will find 
as you look back upon your life that 
the moments that stand out, the mo- 
ments when you have really lived, are 
the moments when you have done 
things in a spirit of love. As memory 
scans the past, above and beyond all 
the transitory pleasures of life, there 
leap forward those supreme hours 
w r hen you have been enabled to dc 
unnoticed kindnesses to those round 
about you, things too trifling to speak 
about, but which you feel have entered 
into your eternal life I ha^e seen 



yS THE GREATEST THING 

almost all the beautiful things God nas 
made; I have enjoyed almost every 
pleasure that he has planned for man ; 
and yet as I look back I see standing 
out above all the life that has gone 
four or five short experiences when the 
love of God reflected itself in some 
poor imitation, some small act of love 
of mine, and these seem to be the 
things which alone of all one's life 
abide. Everything else in all our 
lives is transitory. Every other good 
is visionary. But the acts of love 
which no man knows about, or can 
ever know about — they never fail. 

In the Book of Matthew, where the 
Judgment Day is depicted for us in 
the imagery of One seated upon a 



IN THE WORLD. 79 

throne and dividing the sheep from 
the goats, the test of a man then is not, 
" How have I believed ? " but " How 
have I loved ? " The test of religion, 
the final test of religion, is not relig- 
iousness, but Love. I say the final 
test of religion at that great Day is 
not religiousness, but Love ; not what I 
have done, not what I have believed, 
not what I have achieved, but how I 
have discharged the common charities 
of life. Sins of commission in that 
awful indictment are not even referred 
to. By what we have not done, by 
sins of omission, we are judged , 1\ 
could not be otherwise. For (the with- 
holding of love is the negation of the 
spirit of Christ, the proof that we 



80 THE GREATEST THING 

never knew Him, that for us He lived 
in vain. It means that He suggested 
nothing in all our thoughts, that He 
inspired nothing in all our lives, that 
we were not once near enough to Him 
to be seized with the spell of His com- 
passion for the world. It means that — 

" I lived for myself, I thought for myself, 
For myself, and none beside — 
Just as if Jesus had never lived, 
As if He had never died." 

It is the Son of Man before whom 
the nations of the world shall be 
gathered. It is in the presence of 
Humanity that we shall be charged. 
And the spectacle itself, the mere 
sight of it, will silently judge each 
one. Those will be there whom we 



IN THE WORLD. 8 1 

have met and helped ; or there, the 
unpitied multitude whom we neglected 
or despised. No other witness need 
be summoned. No other charge than 
lovelessness shall be preferred. Be 
not deceived. The words which all of 
us shall one Day hear sound not of 
theology but of life, not of churches 
and saints but of the hungry and the 
poor, not of creeds and doctrines but 
of shelter and clothing, not of Bibles 
and prayer-books but of cups of cold 
water in the name of Christ. Thank 
God the Christianity of to-day is com- 
ing nearer the world's need. Live to 
help that on. Thank God men know 
better, by a hairsbreadth, what religion 
is, what God is, who Christ is, where 



82 GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD. 

Christ is. Who is Christ? He who 
fed the hungry, clothed the naked, 
visited the sick. And where is Christ ? 
Where ? — whoso shall receive a little 
child in My name receiveth Me. Ana 
who are Christ's? Every one that 
loveth is born of Gsd. 



PAX V0BISCU1VL 



"Come unto me, all ye that labor and are 
heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take 
my yoke upon you, and learn of me : for I am 
meek and lowly in heart : and ye shall find 
rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, 
and my burden is light/' 

85 



PAX VOBISCUM. 



r HEARD the other morning a ser- 
* mon by a distinguished preacher 
upon " Rest." It was full of beauti- 
ful thoughts ; but when I came to ask 
myself, " How does he say I can get 
Rest ? " there was no answer. The 
sermon was sincerely meant to be 
practical, yet it contained no experi- 
ence that seemed to me to be tangi- 
ble, nor any ad^'~e which could help 
me to find the thing itself as I went 
about the world that afternoon. Yet 
this omission of the only important 

87 



85 PAX VOBISCUM. 

problem was not the fault of the 
preacher. The whole popular religion 
is in the twilight here. And when 
pressed for really working specifics for 
the experiences with which it deals; 
it falters, and seems to lose itself in 
mist. 

The want of connection between the 
great words of religion and every-day 
life has bewildered and discouraged 
all of us. Christianity possesses the 
noblest words in the language ; its 
literature overflows with terms expres- 
sive of the greatest and happiest 
moods which can fill the soul of man. 
Rest, Joy, Peace, Faith, Love, Light 
— these words occur with such per- 
sistency in hymns and prayers that an 



PEACE BE WITH YOU. 89 

observer might think they formed the 
staple of Christian experience. But 
on coming to close quarters with the 
actual life of most of us, how surely 
would he be disenchanted ! I do not 
think we ourselves are aware how 
much our religious life is made up of 
phrases ; how much of what we call 
Christian experience is only a dialect 
of the Churches, a mere religious 
phraseology with almost nothing be- 
hind it in what we really feel and 
know. 

To some of us, indeed, the Chris- 
tian experiences seem further away 
than when we took the first steps in 
the Christian life. That life has not 
opened out as we had hoped ; we do 



90 PAX VOBISCUM. 

not regret our religion, but we are dis- 
appointed with it. There are times, 
perhaps, when wandering notes from 
a diviner music stray into our spirits; 
but these experiences come at few and 
fitful moments. We have no sense of 
possession in them. When they visit 
us, it is a surprise. When they leave 
us, it is without explanation. When 
we wish their return, we do not know 
how to secure it. 

All which points to a religion with- 
out solid base, and a poor and flicker- 
ing life. It means a great bankruptcy 
in those experiences which give Chris- 
tianity its personal solace and make it 
attractive to the world, and a great 
uncertainty as to any remedy. It is 



PEACE BE WITH YOU. QI 

as if we knew everything about health 
— except the way to get it. 

I am quite sure that the difficulty 
does not lie in the fact that men are 
not in earnest. This is simply not the 
fact. All around us Christians are 
wearing themselves out in trying to be 
better. The amount of spiritual long- 
ing in the world — in the hearts of 
unnumbered thousands of men and 
women in whom we should never sus- 
pect it; among the wise and thought 
ful ; among the young and gay, who 
seldom assuage and never betray their 
thirst — this is one of the most wonder- 
ful and touching facts of life. It is 
not more heat that is needed, but more 
light; not more force, but a wiser di- 



92 PAX VOBISCUM. 

rection to be given to very real energies 
already there. 

The Address which follows is offered 
as an humble contribution to this prob- 
lem, and in the hope that it may help 
some who are " seeking Rest and find- 
ing none " to a firmer footing on one 
great, solid, simple principle which 
underlies not the Christian experiences 
alone, but all experiences, and all life. 

What Christian experience wants in 
thread, a vertebral column, method. It 
is impossible to believe that there is 
no remedy for its unevenness and di- 
shevelment, or that the remedy is a 
secret. The idea, also, that some few 
men, by happy chance or happier 
♦-emperament, have been given the 



PEACE BE WITH YOU. 9^ 

secret — as if there were some sort of 
knack or trick of it — is wholly incredi- 
ble. Religion must ripen its fruit for 
every temperament; and the way even 
into its highest heights must be by a 
gateway through which the peoples of 
the world may pass. 

I shall try to lead up to this gateway 
by a very^ familiar path. But as that 
path is strangely unfrequented, and 
even unknown, where it passes into 
the religious sphere, I must dwell for 
a moment on the commonest of com- 
monplaces. 



94 ? AX VOBISCUM. 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 



IVjOTHING that happens in the 
world happens by chance. God 
is a God of order. Everything is 
arranged upon definite principles, and 
never at random. The world, even 
the religious world, is governed by 
law. Character is governed by law. 
Happiness is governed by law. The 
Christian experiences are governed by 
law. Men, forgetting this, expect 
Rest, Joy, Peace, Faith to drop into 
their souls from the air like snow or 
rain. But in point of fact they do not 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 95 

do so ; and if they did they would no 
less have their origin in previous ac- 
tivities and be controlled by natural 
laws. Rain and snow do drop from 
the air, but not without a long pre- 
vious history. They are the mature 
effects of former causes. Equally so 
are Rest, and Peace, and Joy. They, 
too, have each a previous history. 
Storms and winds and calms are not 
accidents, but are brought about by 
antecedent circumstances. Rest and 
Peace are but calms in man's inward 
nature, and arise through causes as 
definite and as inevitable. 

Realize it thoroughly : it is a me- 
thodical not an accidental world. If a 
housewife turns out a good cake, it is 



96 PAX VOBISCUM. 

the result of a sound receipt, carefully 
applied. She cannot mix the assigned 
ingredients and fire them for the ap- 
propriate time without producing the 
result. It is not she who has made the 
cake; it is nature. She brings related 
things together; sets causes at work; 
these causes bring about the result. 
She is not a creator, but an interme- 
diary. She does not expect random 
causes to produce specific effects — 
random ingredients would only pro- 
duce random cakes. So it is in 
the making of Christian experiences. 
Certain lines are followed ; certain 
effects are the result. These effects 
cannot but be the result. But the 
result can never take place without 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 9/ 

the previous cause. To expect results 
without antecedents is to expect cakes 
without ingredients. That impossi- 
bility is precisely the almost universal 
expectation. 

Now what I mainly wish to do is to 
help you firmly to grasp this simple 
principle of Cause and Effect in the 
spiritual world. And instead of ap- 
plying the principle generally to each 
of the Christian experiences in turn, I 
shall examine its application to one in 
some little detail. The one I shall 
select is Rest. And I think any one 
who follows the application in this 
single instance will be able to apply it 
for himself to all the others. 

Take such a sentence as this : Afri- 



98 PAX VOBISCUM. 

can explorers are subject to fevers 
which cause restlessness and delirium. 
Note the expression, " cause restless- 
ness." Restlessness has a cattse. Clearly 
then, any one who wished to 'get rid 
of restlessness would proceed at once 
to deal with the cause. If that were 
not removed, a doctor might pre- 
scribe a hundred things, and all might 
be taken in turn, without producing 
the least effect. Things are so ai- 
ranged in the original planning of the 
world that certain effects must follow 
certain causes, and certain causes 
must be abolished before certain effects 
can be removed. Certain parts of 
Africa are inseparably linked with the 
physical experience called fever; this 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 99 

fever is in turn infallibly linked with a 
mental experience called restlessness 
and delirium. To abolish the mental 
experience the radical method would 
be to abolish the physical experience, 
and the way of abolishing the physical 
experience would be to abolish Africa, 
cr to cease to go there. Now this 
holds good for all other forms of Rest- 
l^ssness. Every other form and kind 
of Restlessness in the world has a 
definite cause, and the particular kind 
of Restlessness can only be removed 
by removing the allotted cause. 

All this is also true of Rest. Rest- 
lessness has a cause : must not Rest 
have a cause ? Necessarily. If it 
were a chance world we would not 



lOO PAX VOBISCUM. 

expect this ; but, being a methodical 
world, it cannot be otherwise. Rest. 
physical rest, moral rest, spiritual rest, 
every kind of rest, has a cause as cer- 
tainly as restlessness. Now causes 
are discriminating. There is one kind 
of cause for every particular effect, 
and no other; and if one particular 
effect is desired, the corresponding 
cause must be set in motion. It is no 
use proposing finely devised schemes, 
or going through general pious exer- 
cises in the hope that somehow Rest 
will come. The Christian life is not 
casual, but causal. All nature is a 
standing protest against the absurdity 
of expecting to secure spiritual effects, 
or any effects, without the employment 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. ICI 

of appropriate causes. The Great 
Teacher dealt what ought to have been 
the final blow to this infinite irrelevancy 
by a single question. "Do men gather 
grapes of thorns or figs of thistles ? " 

Why, then, did the Great Teacher 
not educate His followers fully ? Why 
did He not tell us, for example, how 
such a thing as Rest might be obtained ? 
The answer is, that He did. But 
plainly, explicitly, in so many words ? 
Yes, plainly, explicitly, in so many 
words. He assigned Rest to its cause, 
in words with which each of us has 
been familiar from his earliest child- 
hood. 

He begins, you remember — for you 
at once know the passage I refer to — 



J 02 PAX VOBISCUM. 

almost as if Rest could be had without 
any cause : " Come unto Me," He 
says, " and I w\\\ give you Rest." 

Rest, apparently, was a favor to be 
bestowed ; men had but to come to 
Him ; He would give it to every appli- 
cant. But the next sentence takes 
that all back. The qualification, in- 
deed, is added instantaneously. For 
what the first sentence seemed to give 
was next thing to an impossibility. 
For how, in a literal sense, can Rest 
be given ? One could no more give 
away Rest than he could give away 
Laughter. We speak of " causing" 
laughter, which we can do ; but we 
cannot give it away. When we speak 
of giving pain, we know perfectly well 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 103 

we cannot give pain away. And 
when we aim at giving pleasure, all 
that we do is to arrange a set of cir- 
cumstances in such a way as that 
tnese shall cause pleasure. Of course 
there is a sense, and a very wonderful 
sense, in which a Great Personality 
breathes upon all who come within its 
influence an abiding peace and trust. 
Men can be to other men as the shadow 
i>f a great rock in a thirsty land. 
Much more Christ; much more Christ 
as Perfect Man ; much more still as 
Savior of the world. But it is not this 
of which I speak. When Christ said 
He would give men rest, He meant 
simply that He would put them in the 
way of it. By no act of conveyance 



104 p AX VOBISCUM. 

would, or could, He make over His 
own Rest to them. He could give 
them His receipt for it. That was all. 
But He would not make it for them : 
for one thing, it was not in His plan to 
make it for them ; for another thing, 
men were not so planned that it could 
be made for them ; and for yet another 
thing, it was a thousand times better 
that they should make it for them- 
selves. 

That this is the meaning becomes 
obvious from the wording of the second 
sentence : " Learn of Me and ye shall 
find Rest." Rest, that is to say, is 
not a thing that can be given, but a 
thing to be acquired. It comes not by 
an act, but by a process. It is not to 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 10$ 

be found in a happy hour, as one finds 
a treasure ; but slowly, as one finds 
knowledge. It could indeed be no 
more found in a moment than could 
knowledge. A soil has to be prepared 
for it. Like a fine fruit, it will grow 
in one climate and not in another; at 
one altitude ^.nd not at another. Like 
all growths it will have an orderly de- 
velopment and mature by slow degrees. 
The nature of this slow process 
Christ clearly defines when He says 
we are to achieve Rest by learning. 
" Learn of Me," He says, " and ye 
shall find Rest to your souls." Now 
consider the extraordinary originality 
of this utterance. How novel the con- 
nection between these two words, 



IC6 FAX yOBISCUM. 

" Leam" and "Rest" ! How few of 
us have ever associated them — ever 
thought that Rest was a thing to be 
learned; ever laid ourselves out for it 
as we would to learn a language ; ever 
practiced it as we would practice the 
violin ? Does it not show how entirely 
new Christ's teaching st^ll is to the 
world, that so old and threadbare an 
aphorism should still be so little ap- 
plied ? The last thing most of us 
would have thought of would have 
been to associate Rest with Work. 

What must one work at ? What is 
that which if duly learned will find the 
soul of man in Rest ? Christ answers 
without the least hesitation. He speci- 
fies two things — Meekness and Low- 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 107 

liness. " Learn of Me," He says, 
( ' for I am meek and lowly in heart." 
Now, these two things are not chosen 
at random. To these accomplish- 
ments, in a special way, Rest is at- 
tached. Learn these, in short, and 
you have already found Rest. These 
as they stand are direct causes of 
Rest ; will produce it at once ; cannot 
but produce it at once. And if you 
think for a single moment, you will 
see how this is necessarily so, for 
causes are never arbitrary, and the 
connection between antecedent and 
consequent here and everywhere lies 
deep in the nature of things. 

What is the connection, then ? I 
answer by a further question. What 



108 PAX VOBISCUM. 

are the chief causes of Unrest? If 
you know yourself, you will answer 
Pride, Selfishness, Ambition. As you 
look back upon the past year.s of your 
life, is it not true that its unhappiness 
has chiefly come from the succession 
of personal mortifications, and almost 
trivial disappointments which the in- 
tercourse of life has brought yon f 
Great trials come at lengthened inter- 
vals, and we rise to breast them ; but 
it is the petty friction of our every 
day life with one another, the jar 
of business or of work, the discord 
of the domestic circle, the collapse of 
our ambition, the crossing of our will 
or the taking down of our conceit, 
which make inward peace impossible. 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. I(X> 

Wounded vanity, then, disappointed 
hopes, unsatisfied selfishness — these 
are the old, vulgar, universal sources 
of man's unrest. 

Now it is obvious why Christ pointed 
out as the two chief objects for attain- 
ment the exact opposites of these. To 
Meekness and Lowliness these things 
simply do not exist. They cure unrest 
by making it impossible. These reme- 
dies do not trifle with surface symp- 
toms ; they strike at once at removing 
causes. The ceaseless chagrin of a 
self-centered life can be removed at 
once by learning Meekness and Low- 
liness of heart. He who learns them 
is for ever proof against it. He lives 
henceforth a charmed life. Chris- 



HO I J AX VOBISCUM. 

tianity is a fine inoculation, a transfu- 
sion of healthy blood into an anaemic 
or poisoned soul. No fever can attack 
a perfectly sound body ; no fever of 
unrest can disturb a soul which has 
breathed the air or learned the ways 
of Christ. Men sigh for the wings of 
a dove that they may fly away and he 
at rest. But flying away will not help 
us. " The Kingdom of God is within 
you" We aspire to the top to look 
for Rest ; it lies at the bottom. Water 
rests only when it gets to the lowest 
place. So do men. Hence, be lowly. 
The man who has no opinion of him- 
self at all can never be hurt if others 
do not acknowledge him. Hence, be 
meek. He who is without expecta 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. I I I 

cion cannot fret if. nothing comes to 
him. It is self-evident that these 
things are so. The lowly man and 
the meek man are really above all 
other men, above all other things. 
They dominate the world because they 
do not care for it. The miser does 
not possess gold, gold possesses him. 
But the meek possess it. " The meek," 
said Christ, "inherit the earth." They 
do not buy it ; they do not conquer it ; 
but they inherit it. 

There are people who go about the 
world looking out for slights, and they 
are necessarily miserable, for they find 
them at every turn — especially the im- 
aginary ones. One has the same pity 
for such men as for the very poor 



112 PAX VOBISCUM. 

They are the morally illiterate. They 
have had no real education, for they 
have never learned how to live. Few 
men know how to live. We grow up 
at random, carrying into mature life 
the merely animal methods and mo- 
tives which we had as little children. 
And it does not occur to us that all 
this must be changed ; that much of it 
must be revised ; that life is the finest 
of the Fine Arts ; that it has to be 
learned with lifelong patience, and that 
the years of our pilgrimage are all too 
short to master it triumphantly. 

Yet this is what Christianity is for — 
to teach men the Art of Life. And 
its whole curriculum lies in one word — 
" Learn of Me." Unlike most educa- 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 113 

tion, this is almost purely personal ; it 
is not to be had from books or lectures 
or creeds or doctrines. It is a study 
from the life. Christ never said much 
in mere words about the Christian 
Graces. He lived them, He was them. 
Yet we do not merely copy Him. 
We learn His art by living with Him, 
like the old apprentices with their 
masters. 

Now we understand it all? Christ's 
invitation to the weary and heavy- 
laden is a call to begin life over again 
upon a new principle — upon His own 
principle. " Watch My way of doing 
things," He says. " Follow Me. 
Take life as I take it. Be meek and 
lowly and you will find Rest/' 



114 PAX VOBISCUM. 

I do not say, remember, that the 
Christian life to every man, or to any 
man, can be a bed of roses. No edu- 
cational process can be this. And 
perhaps if some men knew how much 
was involved in the simple " learn" of 
Christ, they would not enter His school 
with so irresponsible a heart. For 
there is not only much to learn, bat 
much to unlearn. Many men never 
go to this school at all till their dis- 
position is already half ruined and 
character has taken on its fatal set. 
To learn arithmetic is difficult at fifty — 
much more to learn Christianity. To 
learn simply what it is to be meek and 
lowly, in the case of one who has had 
no lessons in that in childhood, may 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 115 

cost him half of what he values most 
on earth. Do we realize, for instance, 
that the way of teaching humility is 
generally by humiliation. There is 
probably no other school for it. When 
a man enters himself as a pupil in such 
a school it means a very great thing. 
There is such Rest there, but there 
is also much Work. 

I should be wrong, even though my 
iheme is the brighter side, to ignore 
the cross and minimize the cost. Only 
it gives to the cross a more definite 
meaning, and a rarer value, to con- 
nect it thus directly and causally with 
the growth of the inner life. Our 
platitudes on the "benefits of afflic- 
tion " are usually about as vague as 



Il6 PAX VOBISCUM. 

•our theories of Christian Experience. 
" Somehow," we believe affliction does 
us good. But it is not a question of 
"Somehow." The result is definite, 
calculable, necessary. It is under the 
strictest law of cause and effect. The 
first effect of losing one's fortune, for 
instance, is humiliation ; and the effect 
of humiliation, as we have just seen, 
is to make one humble ; and "he effect 
of being humble is to produce Rest. 
It is a roundabout way, apparently, of 
producing Rest ; but Nature generally 
works by circular processes ; and it is 
not certain that there is any other way 
of becoming humble, or of finding 
Rest. If a man could make himself 
humble to order, it might simplify 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 117 

matters, but we do not find that this 
happens. Hence we must all go 
through the mill. Hence death, death 
to the lower self, is the nearest gate 
and the quickest road to life. 

Yet this is only half the truth. 
Christ's life outwardly was one of the 
most troubled lives that was ever lived : 
Tempest and tumult, tumult and tem- 
pest, the waves breaking over it all the 
time till the worn body was laid in the 
grave. But the inner life was a sea 
of glass. The great calm was always 
there. At any moment you might 
have gone to Him and found Rest. 
And even when the blood-hounds were 
dogging Him in the streets of Jem 
salem, He turned to His disciples and 



Il8 PAX VOBISCUM. 

offered them as a last legacy, " My 
peace. " Nothing ever for a moment 
broke the serenity of Christ's life on 
earth. Misfortune could not reach 
Him; He had no fortune. Food, rai- 
ment, money — fountain-heads of half 
the world's weariness — He simply did 
not care for; they played no part in 
His life; He " took no thought" for 
them. It was impossible to affect Him 
by lowering His reputation. He had 
already made himself of no reputation. 
He was dumb before insult. When He 
was reviled He reviled not again. In 
fact, there was nothing that the world 
could do to Him that could ruffle the 
surface of His spirit. 

Such living, as merely living, is al- 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. II9 

together unique. It is only when we 
see what it was in Him that we can 
know what the word Rest means. It 
lies not in emotions, nor in the absence 
of emotions. It is not a hallowed feel- 
ing that comes over us in church. It 
is not something that the preacher has 
in his voice. It is not in nature, or in 
poetry, or in music — though in all 
these there is soothing. It is the mind 
at leisure from itself. It is the perfect 
poise of the soul; the absolute adjust- 
ment of the inward man to the stress 
of all outward things ; the prepared- 
ness against every emergency ; the 
stability of assured convictions ; the 
eternal calm of an invulnerable faith ; 
the ^epose of a heart set deep in God. 



120 PAX VOBISCUM. 

It is the mood of the man who says, 
with Browning, " God's in His Heaven, 
all's well with the world." 

/Two painters each painted a picture 
to illustrate his conception of rest. 
The first chose for his scene a still, 
lone lake among the far-off moun- 
tains. The second threw on his can- 
vas a thundering water-fall, with a 
fragile birch tree bending over the 
foam ; at the fork of a branch, almost 
wet with the cataract's spray, a robin 
sat on its nest. The first was only 
Stagnation ; the last was Rest. For in 
Rest there are always two elements — 
tranquility and energy ; silence and 
turbulence ; creation and destruction ; 
fearlessness and fearful;^- ^* TV r 
was in Christ. 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 121 

It is quite plain from all this that 
whatever else He claimed to be or to 
do, He at least knew how to live. All 
this is the perfection of living, of liv- 
ing in the mere sense of passing 
through the world in the best way. 
Hence His anxiety to communicate 
His idea of life to others. He came, 
He said, to give men life, true life, a 
more abundant life than they were 
living ; " the life," as the fine phrase 
in the Revised Version has it, " that is 
life indeed." This is what He him- 
self possessed, and it was this which 
He offers to all mankind. And hence 
His direct appeal for all to come to 
Him who had not made much of life, 
who were weary and heavy laden. 



122 PAX VOBISCUM- 



These He would teach His secret 
They, also, should know "the life that 
is life indeed/ ' 



WHAT YOKES ARE FUR. 1 23 



WHAT YOKES ARE FOR. 



T^HERE is still one doubt to clear 

* up. After the statement, " Learn 

of Me," Christ throws in the discon- 

I 
certing qualification, " Take My Yoke 

upon you and learn of Me." Why, if 

all this be true, does He call it a yoke? 

Why, while professing to give Rest, 

does He with the next breath whisper 

" burden " ? Is the Christian life, after 

all, what its enemies take it for — an 

additional weight to the already great 

woe of life, some extra punctiliousness 

about duty, some painful devotion to ob* 



124 PAX VOBISCUM. 

servances, some heavy restriction ana 
trammelling of all that is joyous and 
free in the world ? Is life not hard and 
sorrowful enough without being fet- 
tered with yet another yoke ? 

It is astounding how so glaring a 
misunderstanding of this plain sentence 
should ever have passed into currency. 
Did you ever stop to ask what a yoke 
is really for? Is it to be a burden to 
the animal which wears it? It is just 
the opposite. It is to make its burden 
light. Attached to the oxen in any 
other way than by a yoke, the plough 
would be intolerable. Worked by 
means of a yoke, it is light. A yoke 
is not an instrument of torture ; it is 
an instrument of mercy. It is not a 



WHAT YOKES ARE FOR. 125 

malicious contrivance for making work 
hard; it is a gentle device to make 
hard labor light. It is not meant to 
give pain, but to save pain. And yet 
men speak of the yoke of Christ as if 
it were a slavery, and look upon those 
who wear it as objects of compassion. 
For generations we have had homi- 
lies on "The Yoke of Christ," some 
delighting in portraying its narrow 
exactions ; some seeking in these exac- 
tions the marks of its divinity ; others: 
apologizing for it, and toning it down ; 
still others assuring us that, although 
it be very bad, it is not to be compared, 
with the positive blessings of Chris- 
tianity. How many, especially among 
the young, has this one mistaken 



126 PAX VOBISCUM. 

phrase driven forever away from ttu 
kingdom of God ? Instead of making 
Christ attractive, it makes Him out 
a taskmaster, narrowing life by petty 
restrictions, calling for self-denial 
where none is necessary, making mis- 
ery a virtue under the plea that it is 
the yoke of Christ, and happiness 
criminal because it now and then 
evades it. According to this concep- 
tion, Christians are at best the victims 
of a depressing fate ; their life is a 
penance; and their hope for the next 
world purchased by a slow martyrdom 
in this. 

The mistake has arisen from taking 
the word "yoke" here in the same 
sense, as in the expressions " under 



WHAT YOKES ARE FOR. 12/ 

the yoke," or ''wear the yoke in his 
youth." But in Christ's illustration 
it is not the jugum of the Roman 
soldier, but the simple " harness" 
or " ox-collar " of the Eastern peasant. 
It is the literal wooden yoke which He, 
with His own hands in the carpenter 
shop, had probably often made. He 
knew the difference between a smooth 
yoke and a rough one, a bad fit and a 
good fit : the difference also it made to 
the patient animal which had to wear 
it. The rough yoke galled, and the 
burden was heavy ; the smooth yoke 
caused no pain, and the burden was 
lightly drawn. The badly-fitted har- 
ness was a misery; the well-fitted col- 
lar was " easy." 



128 PAX VOBISCUM. 

And what was the " burden " ? It 
Was not some special burden laid upon 
the Christian, some unique infliction 
that they alone must bear. It was 
what all men bear. It was simply 
-life, human life itself, the general bur- 
den of life which all must carry with 
them from the cradle to the grave. 
•Christ saw that men took life painfully. 
To some it was a weariness, to others 
a. failure, to many a tragedy, to all a 
struggle and a pain. How to carry 
this burden of life had been the whole 
world's problem. It is still the whole 
world's problem. And here is Christ's 
solution : " Carry it as I do. Take 
life as I take it. Look at it from My 
point of view. Interpret it upon My 



WHAT YOKES ARE FOR. 1 29 

principles. Take My yoke and learn 
of Me, and you will find it easy. For 
My yoke is easy, works easily, sits 
right upon the shoulders, and therefore 
My burden is light." 

There is no suggestion here that 
religion w r ,ill absolve any man from 
bearing burdens. That would be to 
absolve him from living, since it is 
lite itself that is the burden. What 
Christianity does propose is to make it 
tolerable. Christ's yoke is simply His 
secret for the alleviation of human life, 
His prescription for the best and hap- 
piest method of living. Men harness 
themselves to the work and stress of 
the world in clumsy and unnatural 
ways. The harness they put on is 



I30 PAX VOBISCUM. 

antiquated. A rough, ill-fitted collar 
at the best, they make its strain and 
friction past enduring, by placing it 
where the neck is most sensitive ; and 
by mere continuous irritation this sen- 
sitiveness increases until the whole 
nature is quick and sore. 

This is the origin, among other 
things, of a disease called " touchi- 
ness " — a disease which, in spite 01 its 
innocent name, is one of the gravest 
sources of restlessness in the world. 
Touchiness, when it becomes chronic, 
is a morbid condition of the inward 
disposition. It is self-love inflamed to 
the acute point; conceit, with a hair- 
trigger. The cure is to shift the yoke 
to some other place ; to let men and 



WHAT YOKES ARE FOR. I 3 X 

things touch us through some new and 
perhaps as yet unused part of our 
nature ; to become meek and lowly in 
heart while the old nature is becoming 
numb from want of use. It is the beau- 
tiful work of Christianity everywhere to 
adjust the burden of life to those who 
bear it, and them to it. It has a per- 
fectly miraculous gift of healing. With- 
out doing any violence to human nature 
it sets it right with life, harmonizing it 
with all surrounding things, and restor- 
ing those who are jaded with the fatigue 
and dust of the world to a new grace 
of living. In the mere matter of alter- 
ing the perspective of life and changing 
the proportion of things, its functions in 
lightening the care of man is altogether 



132 PAX VOBISCUM. 

its own. The weight of a load depends 
upon the attraction of the earth. But 
suppose the attraction of the earth were 
removed? A ton on some other planet, 
where the attraction of gravity is less, 
does not weigh half a ton. Now Chris- 
tianity removes the attraction of the 
earth, and this is one way in which 
it diminishes men's burden. It makes 
them citizens of another world. What 
was a ton yesterday is not half a ton 
to-day. So without changing one's cir- 
cumstances, merely by offering a wider 
horizon and a different standard, it alters 
the whole aspect of the world. 

Christianity as Christ taught is the 
truest philosophy of life ever spoken. 
But let us be quite sure when we speak 



WHAT YOKES ARE FOR. 1 33 

of Christianity that we mean Christ's 
Christianity. Other versions are either 
caricatures, or exaggerations, or mis- 
understandings, or shortsighted and 
surface readings. For the most part 
their attainment is hopeless and the 
results wretched. But I care not who 
the person is, or through what vale of 
tears he has passed, or is about to pass, 
there is a new life- for him along this 
path. 



134 tAA vuiilSCUM. 



HOW FRUITS GROW. 



\ \ TERE Rest my subject, there are 
* other things I should wish ta 
say about it, and other kinds of Rest 
of which I should like to speak. But 
that is not my subject. My theme is. 
that the Christian experiences are not 
the work of magic, but come under 
the law of Cause and Effect. And I 
have chosen Rest only as a single 
illustration of the working of that 
principle. If there were time I might 
next run over all the Christian experi- 
ences in turn, and show how the same 



HOW FRUITS GROW. 1 35 

wide law applies to each. But I think 
it may serve the better purpose if 
I leave this further exercise to your- 
selves. I know no Bible study that 
you will find more full of fruit, or 
which will take you nearer to the ways 
of God, or make the Christian life 
itself more solid or more sure. I shall 
add only a single other illustration of 
what I mean, before I close. 

Where does Joy come from ? I 
knew a Sunday scholar whose con- 
ception of Joy was that it was a thing 
made in lumps and kept somewhere in 
Heaven, and that when people prayed 
for it, pieces were somehow let down 
and fitted into their souls. I am not 
sure that views as gross and materia] 



I36 PAX VOBISCUM. 

are not often held by people who ought 
to be wiser. In reality, Joy is as 
much a matter of Cause and Effect as 
pain. No one can get Joy by merely 
asking for it. It is one of the ripest 
fruits of the Christian life, and, like 
all fruits, must be grown. There is a 
very clever trick in India called the 
mango-trick. A seed is put in the 
ground and covered s up, and after 
divers incantations a full-blown mango 
bush appears within five minutes. I 
never met any one who knew how 
the thing was done, but I never met 
any one who believed it to be any- 
thing else than a conjuring-trick. The 
world is pretty unanimous now in its 
belief in the orderliness of Nature, 



HOW FRUITS GROW. 1 37 

Men may not know how fruits grow, 
but they do know that they cannot 
grow in five minutes. Some lives 
have not even a stalk on which fruits 
could hang, even if they did grow in 
i\ve minutes. Some have never planted 
one sound seed of Joy in all their lives : 
s.nd others who may have planted a 
germ or two have lived so little in 
sunshine that they never could come 
to maturity. 

Whence, then, is joy? Christ put 
His teaching upon this subject into one 
of the most exquisite of His parables. 
1 should in any instance have appealed 
to His teaching here, as in the case of 
Rest for I do not wish you to think I 
am speaking words of my own. But 



I38 PAX VOBISCUM. 

it so happens that He has dealt with it 
in words of unusual fulness. 

I need not recall the whole illustra- 
tion. It is the parable of the Vine. 
Did you ever think why Christ spoke 
that parable ? He did not merely 
throw it into space as a fine illustration 
of general truths. It was not simply a 
statement of the mystical union, and 
the doctrine of an indwelling Christ. 
It was that; but it was more. After 
He had said it, He did what was not 
an unusual thing when He was teaching 
His greatest lessons. He turned to 
the disciples and said He would tell 
them why He had spoken it. It was 
to tell them how to get joy. "These 
things have I spoken unto you." He 



HOW FRUITS GROW, 1 39 

said, "that My joy might remain in 
you and that your Joy might be full." 
It was a purposed and deliberate com- 
munication of His secret of Happiness, 
Go back over these verses, then, and 
you will find the Causes of this Effect, 
the spring, and the only spring, out of 
which true Happiness comes. I am not 
going to analyze them in detail. I ask 
you to enter into the words for your- 
selves. Remember, in the first place, 
that the Vine was the Eastern symbol 
of Joy. It was its fruit that made glad 
the heart of man. Yet, however inno- 
cent that gladness — for the expressed 
juice of the grape was the common 
drink at every peasant's board — the 
gladness was only a gross and passing 



I4O PAX VOBISCUM. 

thing. This was not true happiness, 
and the vine of the Palestine vineyards 
was not the true vine. Christ was " the 
true Vine." Here, then, is the ulti- 
mate source of Joy. Through whatever 
media it reaches us, all true joy and 
Gladness find their source in Christ. 
By this, of course, is not meant that the 
actual Joy experienced is transferred 
from Christ's nature, or is something 
passed on from Him to us. What is 
passed on is His method of getting 
it. There is, indeed, a sense in which 
we can share another's joy or an- 
other's sorrow. But that is another 
matter. Christ is the source of Joy 
to men in tie sense in which He is 
the source of Rest. His people share 



HOW FRUITS GROW. I 4 I 

His life, and therefore share its con- 
sequences, and one of these is Joy. 
His method of living is one that in the 
nature of things produces Joy. When 
He spoke of His Joy remaining with 
us, He meant in part that the causes 
which produced it should continue to 
act. His followers, that is to say, 
by repeating His life would experi- 
ence its accompaniments. His Joy, 
His kind of Joy, would remain with 
them. 

The medium through which this Joy 
comes is next explained : " He that 
abideth in Me, the same bringeth forth 
much fruit." Fruit first, Joy next; the 
one the cause or medium of the other. 
Fruit-bearing is the necessary antece- 



142 PAX VOBISCUM. 

dent ; Joy both the necessary conse- 
quent &nd the necessary accompani- 
ment. It lay partly in the bearing 
fruit, partly in the fellowship which 
made that possible. Partly, that is to 
say, Joy lay in mere constant living in 
Christ's presence, with all that that 
implied of peace, of shelter and of 
love ; partly in the influence of that 
Life upon mind and character and 
will ; and partly in the inspiration to 
live and work for others, with all that 
that brings of self-riddance and Joy 
in others' gain. All these, in different 
ways and at different times, are sources 
of pure Happiness. Even the sim- 
plest of them — to do good to other 
people — is an instant and infalli- 



HOW FRUITS GROW. I43 

ble specific. There is no mystery 
about Happiness whatever. Put in the 
right ingredients and it must come out. 
He that abide th in Him will bring 
forth much fruit ; and bringing forth 
much fruit is Happiness. The infalli- 
ble receipt for Happiness, then, is to 
do good ; and the infallible receipt for 
doing good is to abide in Christ. The 
surest proof that all this is a plain 
matter of Cause and Effect is that men 
may try every other conceivable way 
of finding Happiness, and they will 
fail. Only the right cause in each 
case can produce the right effect. 

Then the Christian experiences are 
our own making ? In the same sense 
in which grapes are our own making, 



144 PAX VOBISCUM. 

and no more. All fruits grow — 
whether they grow in the soil or in 
the soul ; whether they are the fruits 
of the wild grape or of the True Vine. 
No man can make things grow. He 
ca'n get them to grozv by arranging all 
the circumstances and fulfilling all the 
conditions. But the growing is done 
by God. Causes and effects are eternal 
arrangements, set in the constitution of 
the world ; fixed beyond man's order- 
ing. What man can do is to place 
himself in the midst of a chain of 
sequences. Thus he can get things to 
grow : thus he himself can grow. Bat 
the grower is the Spirit of God. 

What more need I add but this - - 
test the method by experiment. Do 



HOW FRUITS GROW. 14 5 

not imagine that you have got these 
things because you know how to get 
them. As well try to feed upon a 
cookery book. But I think I can 
promise that if you try in this simple 
and natural way, you will not fail. 
Spend the time you have spent in 
sighing for fruits in fulfilling the con • 
ditions of their growth. The fruits 
will come, must come. We have hith- 
erto paid immense attention to effects, 
to the mere experiences themselves ; 
we have described them, extolled them, 
advised them, prayed for them — done 
everything but find out what caused 
;hem. Henceforth let us deal with 
causes. " To be," says Lotze, " is to 
be in relations." About every other 



I46 PAX VOBISCUM. 

method of living the Christian life 
there is an uncertainty. About every 
other method of acquiring the Chris- 
tian experiences there is a " perhaps." 
But in so far as this method is the 
way of nature, it cannot fail. Its 
guarantee is the laws of the universe, 
and these are " the Hands of the Liv- 
ing God." 



THE TRUE VINE. 1 47 



THE TRUE VINE. 



" T AM the true vine, and my Father 
is the husbandman. Every branch 
in me that beareth not fruit he taketh 
away : and every branch that beareth 
fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring 
forth more fruit. Now ye are clean 
through the word which I have spoken 
unto you. Abide in me, and I in 
you. As the branch cannot bear fruit 
of itself, except it abide in the vine ; 
no more can ye, except ye abide in 
me. I am the vine, ye are the 
branches : he that abideth in me, and 
I in him, the same bringeth forth much 



I48 PAX VOBISCUM. 

fruit : for without me ye can do noth- 
ing. If a man abide not in me, he is 
cast forth as a branch, and is withered ; 
and men gather them, and cast them 
into the fire, and they are burned. If 
ye abide in me, and my word abide in 
you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it 
shall be done unto you. Herein is 
my Father glorified, that ye may bear 
much fruit ; so ye shall be my disciples. 
As the Father hath loved me, so 
have I loved you : continue ye in my 
love. If ye keep my commandments, 
ye shall abide in my love ; even as I 
have kept my Father's commandments, 
and abide in his, love. These things 
have I spoken unto you, that my joy 
might remain in you, and that your 
v v might be full." 



THE CHANGED LIFE 



PREFACE. 

AST autumn, in a book-shop in 
*^* California, the author found a 
little book with his name upon the title- 
page — a book which he did not 'know 
existed ; which he never wrote ; nor 
baptized with the title which it bore. 
This stray publication — taken from 
shorthand notes of a spoken Address — 
he does not grudge. Already, it seems, 
it has done its small measure of good. 
But owing to the imperfections which 
it contains it has been thought right to 
issue a more complete edition. 

151 



152 PREFACE. 

The theme, like its predecessors in 
this series, represents but a single 
aspect of its great subject — the man- 
ward side. The light and shade is 
apportioned with this in view. And 
the reader's kind attention is asked to 
this limitation, lest he wonder at points 
being left in shadow which theology 
has always, and rightly, taught us to 
emphasize. 

It was the hearing of a simple talk 
by a friend to some plain people in a 
Highland deer-forest which first called 
the author's attention to the practical- 
ness of this solution of the cardinal 
problem of Christian experience. What 
follows owes a large debt to that Sunday 
morning. 



We all 

With unveiled face 

Reflecting 

As a Mirror 

The Glory of the Lord 

Are transformed 

Into the same image 

From Glory to Glory 

Even as from the Lord 

The Spirit. 

153 



THE CHANGED LIFE. 



" I protest that if some great power would 
agree to make me always think what is true 
and do what is right, on condition of being 
turned into a sort of clock and wound up every 
morning, I should instantly close with the 
offer." 

HPHESE are the words of Mr. Hux- 
ley. The infinite desirability, the 
infinite difficulty of being good — the 
theme is as old as humanity. The 
man does not live from whose deeper 
being the same confession has not 
risen, or who would not give his all 

i55 



156 THE CHANGED LIFE, 

to-morrow, if he could " close with the 
offer," of becoming a better man. 

I propose to make that offer now. 
In all seriousness, without being 
"turned into a sort of clock," the end 
can be attained. Under the right con- 
ditions it is as natural for character to 
become beautiful as for a flower ; and 
if on God's earth there is not some 
machinery for effecting it, the supreme 
gift to the world has been forgotten. 
This is simply what man was made 
for. With Browning : " I say that 
Man was made to grow, not stop." 
Or in the deeper words of an older 
Book : " Whom He did foreknow. He 
also did predestinate ... to b^ con- 
formed to the Image of His Son." 



THE CHANGED LIFE. I 5/ 

Let me begin by naming, and in 
part discarding, some processes in 
vogue already, for producing better 
lives. These processes are far from, 
wrong; in their place they may even 
be essential. One ventures to dispar- 
age them only because they do not 
turn out the most perfect possible, 
work. 

The first imperfect method is to rely 
on Resolution. In will-power, in mere, 
spasms of earnestness there is no sal- 
vation. Struggle, effort, even agony, 
have their place in Christianity, as we 
shall see ; but this is not where they 
come in. In mid-Atlantic the other 
day, the Etruria, in which I was sail- 
ing, suddenly stopped. Something 



1 58 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

had gone wrong with the engines. 
There were five hundred able-bodied 
men on board the ship. Do you think 
that if we had gathered together and 
pushed against, the mast we could have 
pushed it on ? When one attempts to 
sanctify himself by effort, he is trying 
to make his boat go by pushing against 
the mast. He is like a drowning man 
trying to lift himself out of the water 
by pulling at the hair of his own head. 
Christ held up this method almost to 
ridicule when he said, " Which of you 
by taking thought can add a cubit to 
his stature ? " The one redeeming fea- 
ture of the self-sufficient method is this 
— that those who try it find out almost 
at once that it will not gain the goal. 



THE CHANGED LIFE. I 59 

Another experimenter says : " But 
that is not my method. I have seen 
the folly of a mere wild struggle in 
the dark. I work on a principle. My 
plan is not to waste power on random 
effort, but to concentrate on a single 
sin. By taking one at a time, and 
crucifying it steadily, I hope in the 
end to extirpate all." To this, unfor- 
tunately, there are four objections : 
For one thing, life is too short ; the 
name of sin is Legion. Fo\ another 
thing, to deal with individual sins is to 
leave the rest of the nature for the time 
untouched. In the third place a single 
combat with a special sin does not affect 
the root and spring of the disease. If 
only one of the channels of sin be ob» 



l60 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

structed, experience points to an almost 
certain overflow through some other 
part of the nature. Partial conversion 
is almost always accompanied by such 
moral leakage, for the pent-up energies 
accumulate to the bursting point, and 
the last state of that soul may be worse 
than the first. In the last place, reli- 
gion does not consist in negatives, in 
stopping this sin and stopping that. 
The perfect character can never be 
produced with a pruning knife. 

But a third protests : " So be it. I 
make no attempt to stop sins one by 
one. My method is just the opposite. 
I copy the virtues one by one." The 
difficulty about the copying method is 
that it is apt to be mechanical. One 



THE CHANGED LIFE. l6l 

can always tell an engraving from a 
picture, an artificial flower from a real 
flower. To copy virtues one by one 
has somewhat the same effect as erad- 
icating the vices one by one ; the 
temporary result is an overbalanced 
and incongruous character. Some one 
defines a prig as " a creature that is 
over-fed for its size." One sometimes 
finds Christians of this species — over- 
fed on one side of their nature, but 
dismally thin and starved-looking oil 
the other. The result for instance, of 
copying Humility, and adding it on to 
an otherwise worldly life, is simply gro- 
tesque. A rabid temperance advocate, 
for the same reason, is often the poor- 
est of creatures, flourishing on a single 



1 62 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

virtue, and quite oblivious that his Tem- 
perance is making a worse man of 
him and not a better. These are 
examples of fine virtues spoiled by 
association with mean companions. 
Character is a unity, and all the virtues 
must advance together to make th^ 
perfect man. This method of sanctift- 
cation, nevertheless, is in the tru^ 
direction. It is only in the details of 
execution that it fails. 

A fourth method I need scarcely 
mention, for it is a variation on those 
already named. It is the very young 
man's method ; and the pure earnest- 
ness of it makes it almost desecration 
to touch it. It is to keep a private 
note-book with columns for the days 



THE CHANGED LIFE. l6j 

of the week, and a list of virtues with 
spaces against each for marks. This, 
with many stern rules for preface, is 
stored away in a secret place, and 
from time to time, at nightfall, the 
soul is arraigned before it as before 
a private judgment bar. This living 
by code was Franklin's method ; and 
I suppose thousands more could tell 
how they had hung up in their bed- 
rooms, or hid in lock-fast drawers, the 
rules which one solemn day they drew 
up to shape their lives. This method 
is not erroneous, only somehow its 
success is poor. You bear me wit- 
ness that it fails. And it fails gener- 
ally for very matter-of-fact reasons — 
most likely because one day we forget 
the rules. 



1 64 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

All these methods that have been 
named — the self-sufficient method, the 
self-crucifixion method, the mimetic 
method, and the diary method — are 
perfectly human, perfectly natural, per- 
fectly ignorant, and, as they stand, per- 
fectly inadequate. It is not argued, I 
repeat, that they must be abandoned. 
Their harm is rather that they distract 
attention from the true working method, 
and secure a fair result at the expense 
of the perfect one. What that perfect 
method is we shall now go on to ask. 



FORMULA OF SANCTIFICATION. 1 65 



THE FORMULA OF SANCTI- 
FICATION. 



A FORMULA, a receipt, for Sane- 
* tification — can one seriously 
speak of this mighty change as if the 
process were as definite as for the pro- 
duction of so many volts of electricity ? 
It is impossible to doubt it. Shall a 
mechanical experiment succeed infalli- 
bly, and the one vital experiment of 
humanity remain a chance ? Is corn 
to grow by method, and character by 
caprice ? If we cannot calculate to a 
certainty that the forces of religion 



1 66 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

will do their work, then is religion 
vain. And if we cannot express the 
law of these forces in simple words, 
then is Christianity not the world's 
religion, but the world's conundrum. 

Where, then, shall one look for such 
a formula ? Where one would look for 
any formula — among the text-books. 
And if we turn to the text-books of 
Christianity we shall find a formula for 
this problem as clear and precise as 
any in the mechanical sciences. If 
this simple rule, moreover, be but fol- 
lowed fearlessly, it will yield the result 
of a perfect character as surely as any 
result that is guaranteed by the laws of 
nature. The finest expression of this 
rule in Scripture, or indeed in any lit- 



FORMULA OF SANCTIFICATION. 1 67 

erature, is probably one drawn up and 
condensed into a single verse by Paul. 
You will find it in a letter — the second 
to the Corinthians — written by him to 
some Christian people who, in a city 
which was a byword for depravity and 
licentiousness, were seeking the higher 
life. To see the point of the words we 
must take them from the immensely 
improved rendering of the Revised 
translation, for the older Version in 
this case greatly obscures the sense. 
They are these : " We all, with un- 
veiled face reflecting as a mirror the 
glory of the Lord, are transformed 
into the same image from glory to 
glory, even as from the Lord the 
Spirit." 



l68 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

Now observe at the outset the entire 
contradiction of all our previous efforts, 
in the simple passive "we are trans- 
formed/' We are changed, as the 
Old Version has it — we do not change 
ourselves. No man can change him- 
self. Throughout the New Testament 
you will find that wherever these 
moral and spiritual transformations are 
described the verbs are in the passive. 
Presently it will be pointed out that 
there is a rationale in this; but mean 
time do not toss these words aside as 
if this passivity denied all human effort 
or ignored intelligible law. What is 
implied for the soul here is no more 
than is everywhere claimed for the 
body. In physiology the verbs de- 



FOivMULA OF SANCTIFICATION. 1 69 

scribing the processes of growth are 
in the passive. Growth is not volun- 
tary; it takes place, it happens, it is 
wrought upon matter. So here. "Ye 
must be born again " — we cannot born 
ourselves. * " Be not conformed to this 
world, but be ye transformed" — we are 
subjects to transforming influence, we 
do not transform ourselves. Not more 
certain is it that it is something outside 
the thermometer that produces a change 
in the thermometer, than it is some- 
thing outside the soul of man that 
produces a moral change upon him. 
That he must be susceptible to that 
change, that he must be a party to it, 
goes without saying; but that neither 
his aptitude nor his will can produce 
it, is equally certain. 



170 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

Obvious as it ought to seem, this 
may be to some an almost startling 
revelation. The change we have been 
striving after is not to be produced by 
any more striving after. It is to be 
wrought upon us by the moulding of 
hands beyond our own. As the branch 
ascends, and the bud bursts, and the 
fruit reddens under the co-operation of 
influences from the outside air, so man 
rises to the higher stature under invisi- 
ble pressures from without. The radi- 
cal defect of all our former methods 
of sanctification was the attempt to 
generate from within that which can 
only be wrought upon us from without. 
According to the first Law of Motion : 
Every body continues in its state of 



FORMULA OF SANCTIFICATION. I/I 

rest, or of uniform motion in a straight 
line, except in so far as it may be com- 
pelled by impressed forces to change 
that state. This is also a first law of 
Christianity. Every man's character 
remains- as it is, or continues in the di- 
rection in which it is going, until it is 
compelled by impressed forces to change 
that state. Our failure has been the 
failure to put ourselves in the way of 
the impressed forces. There is a clay, 
and there is a Potter ; we have tried to 
get the clay to mould the clay. 

Whence, then, these pressures, and 
where this Potter ? The answer of the 
formula is " By reflecting as a mirror 
the glory of the Lord we are changed. ,, 
But this is not very clear. What is 



172 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

the "glory" of the Lord, and how can 
mortal man reflect it, and how can that 
act as an "impressed force" in mould- 
ing him to a nobler form ? The word 
"glory" — the word which has to bear 
the weight of holding those " impressed 
forces " — is a stranger in current 
speech, and our first duty is to seek 
out its equivalent in working English. 
It suggests at first a radiance of some 
kind, something dazzling or glittering, 
some halo such as the old masters 
loved to paint round the heads of their 
Ecce Homos. But that is paint, mere 
matter, the visible symbol of some 
unseen thing. What is that unseen 
thing ? It is that of all unseen things 
the most radiant, the most beautiful, 



FORMULA OF SANCTJFICATION. 1 73 

the most Divine, and that is Character. 
On earth, in Heaven, there is nothing 
so great, so glorious as this. The 
word has many meanings ; in ethics it 
can have but one. Glory is character, 
and nothing less, and it can be nothing 
more. The earth is " full of the glory 
of the Lord," because it is full of His 
character. The "Beauty of the Lord" 
is character. " The effulgence of His 
Glory" is character. "The Glory of 
the Only Begotten " is character, the 
character which is " fulness of grace 
and truth." And when God told His 
people His name He simply gave them 
His character, His character which, 
was Himself : " And the Lord pro- 
claimed the name of the Lord . . .. 



174 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and 
gracious, long-suffering and abundant 
in goodness and truth." Glory then is 
not something intangible, or ghostly, 
or transcendental. If it were this 
how could Paul ask men to reflect it ? 
Stripped of its physical enswathement 
it is Beauty, moral and spiritual Beauty, 
Beauty infinitely real, infinitely exalted, 
yet infinitely near and infinitely com- 
municable. 

With this explanation read over the 
sentence once more in paraphrase : 
We all reflecting as a mirror the char- 
acter of Christ are transformed into the 
same Image from character to charac- 
ter — from a poor character to a better 
one, from a better one to one 2 little 



FORMULA OF SANXTIFICATION. 1 75 

better still, from that to one still more 
complete, until by slow degrees the 
Perfect Image is attained. Here the 
solution of the problem of sanctification 
is compressed into a sentence : Reflect 
the character of Christ, and you will 
become like Christ. 

All men are mirrors — that is the first 
law on which this formula is based. 
One of the aptest descriptions of a 
human being is that he is a mirror. 
As we sat at table to-night the world 
in which each of us lived and moved 
throughout this day was focussed in 
the room. What we saw as we looked 
at one another was not one another, 
but one another's world. We were 
an arrangement of mirrors. The 



I76 THE CH.aNGED LIFE. 

scenes we saw were all reproduced ; 
the people we met walked to and fro ; 
they spoke, they bowed, they passed 
us by, did everything over again as if 
it had been real. When we talked, 
we were but looking at our own mir- 
ror and describing what flitted across 
it ; our listening was not hearing, but 
seeing — we but looked on our neigh- 
bor's mirror. All human intercourse 
is a seeing of reflections. I meet a 
stranger in a railway carriage. The 
cadence of his first word tells me he 
is English, and comes from Yorkshire. 
Without knowing it he has reflected 
his birthplace, his parents, and the 
long history of their race. Even phys- 
iologically he is a mirror. His second 



FORMULA OF SANCTIFICATION. 1 77 

sentence records that he is a politician, 
and a faint inflection in the way he 
pronounces The Times reveals his 
party. In his next remarks I see re- 
flected a whole world of experiences. 
The books he has read, the people 
he has met, the influences that have 
played upon him and made him the 
man he is — these are all registered 
there by a pen which lets nothing 
pass, and whose writing can never be 
blotted out. What I am reading in 
him meantime he also is reading in 
me ; and before the journey is over 
we could half write each other's lives. 
Whether we like it or not, we live in 
glass houses. The mind, the memory, 
the soul, is simply a vast chamber 



I78 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

panelled with looking-glass. And upon 
this miraculous 'arrangement and en- 
dowment depends the capacity of mor- 
tal souls to " reflect the character of 
the Lord." 

But this is not all. If all these 
varied reflections from our so-called 
secret life are patent to the world, how 
close the writing, how complete the 
record, within the soul itself ! For the 
influences we meet are not simply held 
for a moment on the polished surface 
and thrown off again into space. Each 
is retained where first it fell, and stored 
up in the soul forever. 

This law of Assimilation is the sec- 
ond, and by far the most impressive 
truth which underlies the formula of 



FORMULA OF SANCTIFIv^ATION. 1^C> 

sanctification — the truth that men are 
not only mirrors, but that these mirrors, 
so far from being mere reflectors of the 
fleeting things they see, transfer into 
their own inmost substance, and hold 
in permanent preservation, the things 
that they reflect. No one knows how 
the soul can hold these things. No 
one knows how the miracle is done. 
No phenomenon in nature, no process 
m chemistry, no chapter in necro- 
mancy can ever help us to begin to 
understand this amazing operation. 
For, think of it, the past is not only 
focussed there, in a man's soul, it is 
there. How could it be reflected from 
there if it were not there ? All things 
::hat he has ever seen, known, felt, 



l80 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

believed of the surrounding world are 
now within him, have become part of 
him, in part are him — he has been 
changed into their image. He may- 
deny it, he may resent it, but they are 
there. They do not adhere to him, 
they are transfused through him. He 
cannot alter or rub them out. They 
are not in his memory, they are in 
him. His soul is as they have filled it, 
made it, left it. These things, these 
books, these events, these influences 
are his makers. In their hands are 
life and death, beauty and deformity. 
When once the image or likeness of 
any of these is fairly presented to the 
soul, no power on earth can hinder 
two things happening — it must be 



FORMULA OF SANCTIFICATION. l8l 

absorbed into the soul, and forever 
reflected back again from character. 

Upon these astounding yet perfectly 
obvious psychological facts, Paul bases 
his doctrine of sanctification. He 
sees that character is a thing built 
up by slow degrees, that it is hourly 
changing for better or for worse 
according to the images which flit 
across it. One step further and the 
whole length and breadth of the appli- 
cation of these ideas to the central 
problem of religion will stan<i before 
us. 



1 82 THE CHANGED LIFE. 



THE ALCHEMY OF INFLU- 
ENCE. 



TF events change men, much more 
persons. No man can meet an- 
other on the street without making 
some mark upon him. We say we 
exchange words when we meet; what 
we exchange is souls. And when inter- 
course is very close and very frequent, 
so complete is this exchange that rec- 
ognizable bits of the one soul begin 
to show in the other's nature, and the 
second is conscious of a similar and 
growing debt to the first. 



THE ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCE. 1 83 

This mysterious approximating of 
two souls who has not witnessed ? 
Who has not watched some old couple 
come down life's pilgrimage hand in 
hand{ with such gentle trust and joy in 
one another that their very faces wore 
the self-same look? These were not 
two souls; it was a composite soul. 
It did not matter to which of the 
two you spoke you would have said 
the same words to either. It was 
quite indifferent which replied, each 
would have said the same. Half a 
century's reflecting had told upon 
them ; they were changed into the 
same image. It is the Law of In- 
fluence that we become like those whom 
we habitually admire: these had be- 



184 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

come like because they habitually 
admired. Through all the range of 
literature, of history, and biography 
this law presides. Men are all mosaics 
of other men. There was a savor of 
David about Jonathan and a savor of 
Jonathan about David. Jean Valjean, 
in the masterpiece of Victor Hugo, is 
Bishop Bienvenu risen from the dead. 
Metempsychosis is a fact. George 
Eliot's message to the world was that 
men and women make men and wo- 
men. The Family, the cradle of 
mankind, has no meaning apart from 
this. Society itself is nothing but a 
rallying point for these omnipotent 
forces to do their work. On the doc- 
trine of Influence, in short, the whole 
vast pyramid of humanity is built. 



TitZ ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCE. 1 85 

But it was reserved for Paul to make 
the supreme application of the Law of 
Influence. It was a tremendous infer- 
ence to make, but he never hesitated. 
He himself was a changed man; he 
knew exactly what had done it ; it was 
Christ. On the Damascus road they 
met, and from that hour his life was 
absorbed in His. The effect could not 
but follow — on words, on deeds, on 
career, on creed. The " impressed 
forces" did their vital work. He be- 
came like Him Whom he habitually 
loved. "So we all," ' he writes, "re- 
flecting as a mirror the glory of Christ, 
are changed into the same image." 

Nothing could be more simple, more 
intelligible, more natural, more super- 



1 86 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

natural. It is an analogy from an 
every-day fact. Since we are what 
we are by the impacts of those who 
surround us, those who surround 
themselves with the highest will be 
those who change into the highest. 
There are some men and some women 
in whose company we are always at 
our best. While with them we cannot 
think mean thoughts or speak ungen- 
erous words. Their mere presence 
is elevation, purification, sanctity. All 
the best stops in our nature are drawn 
out by their intercourse, and we find a. 
music in our souls that was never there 
before. Suppose even that influence pro- 
longed through a month, a year, a life- 
time, and what could not life become ? 



THE ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCE. 1 87 

Here, even on the common plane of 
life, talking our language, walking 
our streets, working side by side, are 
sanctifiers of souls ; here, breathing 
through common clay, is Heaven ; 
here, energies charged even through a 
temporal medium with the virtue of 
regeneration. If to live with men, 
diluted to the millionth degree with 
the virtue of the Highest, can exalt and 
purify the nature, what bounds can 
be set to the influence of Christ? 
To live with Socrates — with unveiled 
face — must have made one wise ; w T ith 
Aristides, just. Francis of Assisi must 
have made one gentle; Savonarola, 
strong. But to have lived with Christ 
must have made one like Christ; that 
is to say, A Christian. 



I 

THE CHANGED LIFE. 



As a matter of fact, to live with 
Christ did produce this effect. It pro- 
duced it in the case of Paul. And 
during Christ's lifetime the experiment 
was tried ^ in an even more startling 
form. A few raw, unspiritual, unin- 
spiring men, were admitted to the inner 
circle of His friendship. The change 
began at once. Day by day we can 
almost see the first disciple grow. 
First there steals over them the faintest 
possible adumbration of His character,, 
and occasionally, very occasionally, 
they do a thing or say a thing that tney 
could not have done or said had they 
not been living there. Slowly the 
spell of His Life deepens. Reach 
after reach of their nature is overtaken, 



THE ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCE I 89 

thawed, subjugated, sanctified. Their 
manner softens, their words become 
more gentle, their conduct more un- 
selfish. As swallows who have found 
a summer, as frozen buds the spring, 
their starved humanity bursts into a 
fuller life. They do not know how it 
is, but they are different men. One 
day they find themselves like their 
Master, going about and doing good. 
To themselves it is unaccountable, 
but they cannot do otherwise. They 
were not told to do it, it came to them 
to do it. But the people who watch 
them know well how to account for it 
— "They have been," they whisper, 
"with Jesus." Already even, the 
mark and seai 3f His character is upon 



190 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

them — "They have been with Jesus." 
Unparalleled phenomenon, that these 
poor fishermen should remind other 
men of Christ! Stupendous victory 
and mystery of regeneration that mor- 
tal men should suggest to the world, 
God! 

There is something almost melting 
in the way His contemporaries, and 
John especially, speak of the influence 
of Christ. John lived himself in 
daily wonder at Him ; he was over- 
powered, over-awed, entranced, trans- 
figured. To his mind it was impossi- 
ble for any one to come under this 
influence and ever be the same again. 
" Whosoever abideth in Him sinneth 
not," he said. It was inconceivable 



THE ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCE. igi 

chat he should sin, as inconceivable as 
that ice should live in a burning sun, 
jr darkness coexist with noon. If any 
one did sin, it was to John the sim- 
ple proof that he could never have met 
Christ. " Whosoever sinneth," he ex- 
claims, "hath not seen Him, neither 
known Him." Sin was abashed in 
chis Presence. Its roots withered. 
Its sway and victory were forever at 
.in end. 

But these were His contemporaries, 
it was easy for ihtm to be influenced 
by Him, for they were every day and 
all the day together. But how can 
we mirror that which we have never 
seen ? How can all this stupendous 
result be produced \>y a Memory, by 



1 92 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

the scantiest of all Biographies, Iry 
One who lived and left this earth 
eighteen hundred years ago ? How 
can modern men to-day make Christ, 
the absent Christ, their most constant 
companion still ? The answer is that 
Friendship is a spiritual thing. It is 
independent of Matter, or Space, or 
Time. That which I love in my 
friend is not that which I see. What 
influences me in my friend is not h.\s 
body but his spirit. It would have 
been an ineffable experience truly to 
have lived at that time — 

"I think when I read the sweet story of old 
How when Jesus was here among men, 
He took little children like lambs to his fold, 
1 should like to have been with Him then. 



THi: ALCHEMY OF INFLUEI\ T C£. IQ3 

" I wish that His hand had been laid on my 
head, 
That His arms had been thrown around me, 
And that I had seen His kind look when he said, 
6 Let the little ones come unto me. 1 " 



And yet, if Christ were to come into 
the world again few of us probably 
would- ever have a chance of seeing 
Him. Millions of her subjects, in this 
little country, have never seen their 
own Queen. And there would be 
millions of the subjects of Christ who 
could never get within speaking dis- 
tance of Him if He were here. Our 
companionship with Him, like all true 
companionship, is a spiritual com- 
munion. All friendship, all love, 
human and Divine, is purely spiritual. 



194 THE CHANGED LIFE. ' 

It was after He was risen that He 
influenced even the disciples most 
Hence in reflecting the character of 
Christ, it is no real obstacle that we 
may never have been in visible con- 
tact with Himself. 

There lived once a young girl whose 
perfect grace of character was the 
wonder of those who knew her. She 
wore on her neck a gold locket which 
no one was ever allowed to open. One 
day, in a moment of unusual confi- 
dence, one of her companions was 
allowed to touch its spring and learn 
its secret. She saw written these 
words — "Whom having not seen, I 
love." That was the secret of her 
beautiful life. She had been changed 
into the Same Image. 



THE ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCE. 1 95; 

Now this is not imitation, but a 
much deeper thing. Mark this dis- 
tinction. For the difference in the 
process, as well as in the result, may 
be as great as that between a photo- 
graph secured by the infallible pencil 
of the sun, and the rude outline from 
a school-boy's chalk. Imitation is 
mechanical, reflection organic. The 
one is occasional/the other habitual. 
In the one case, man comes to God 
and imitates Him ; in the other, God 
comes to man and imprints Himself 
upon him. It is quite true that there 
is an imitation of Christ which amounts 
to reflection. But Paul's term includes 
all that the other holds, and is open to 
no mistake. 



I96 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

'" Make Christ your most constant 
companion " — this is what it practically 
means for us. Be more under His in- 
fluence than under any other influence. 
Ten minutes spent in His society every 
day, ay, two minutes if it be face to 
face, and heart to heart, will make the 
whole day different. Every character 
has an inward spring, let Christ be it. 
Every action has a key-note, let Christ 
set it. Yesterday you got a certain 
letter. You sat down and wrote a re- 
ply which almost scorched the paper. 
You picked the cruellest adjectives 
you knew and sent it forth, without a 
pang, to do its ruthless work. You 
did that because your life was set in 
the wrong key. You began the day 



THE ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCE. 1 97 

with the mirror placed at the wrong 
angle. To-morrow, at day-break, turn 
it towards Him, and even to your 
enemy the fashion of your counte- 
nance will be changed. Whatever 
you then do, one thing you will find 
you could not do — you could not write 
that letter. Your first impulse may be 
the same, your judgment may be un- 
changed, but if you try it the ink will 
dry on your pen, and you will rise 
from your desk an unavenged, but 
a greater and more Christian, man. 
Throughout the whole day your ac- 
tions, down to the last detail, will do 
homage to that early vision. Yester- 
day you thought mostly about your- 
self. To-day the poor will meet you, 



\Cj6 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

and you will feed them. The help- 
less, the tempted, the sad, will throng 
about you, and each you will befriend. 
Where were all these people yester- 
day? Where they are to-day, but you 
did not see them. It is in reflected 
light that the poor are seen. But your 
soul to-day is not at the ordinary angle. 
" Things which are not seen " are 
visible. For a few short hours you 
live the Eternal Life. The eternal 
life, the life of faith, is simply the life 
of the higher vision. Faith is an atti- 
tude — a mirror set at the right angle. 
When to-morrow is over, and in the 
evening you review it, you will won- 
der how you did it. You will not be 
conscious that you strove for anything,, 



THE ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCE. 1 99 

or imitated anything, or crucified any- 
thing. You will be conscious ot 
Christ; that he was with you, that 
without compulsion you were yet com- 
pelled, that without force, or noise, or 
proclamation, the revolution was ac- 
complished. You do not congratulate 
yourself as one who has done a mighty 
deed, or achieved a personal success, 
or stored up a fund of " Christian 
experience " to ensure the same result 
again. What you are conscious of is 
"the glory of the Lord." And what 
the world is conscious of, if the result 
be a true one, is also " the glory of the 
Lord." In looking at a mirror one 
does not see the mirror, or think of it. 
but only of what it reflects. For a 



200 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

mirror never calls attention to itself — 
except when there are flaws in it. 

That this is a real experience and 
not a vision, that this life is possible to 
men, is being lived by men to-day, 
is simple biographical fact. From a 
thousand witnesses I cannot forbear to 
summon one. The following are the 
words of one of the highest intellects 
this age has known, a man who shared 
the burdens of his country as few have 
done, and who, not in the shadows of 
old age, but in the high noon of his 
success, gave this confession — I quote 
it with only a few abridgments — to the 
world : 

" I want to speak to-night only a 
little, but that little I desire to speak of 



THE ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCE. 2CI 

the sacred name of Christ, who is my 
life, my inspiration, my hope, and my 
surety. I cannot help stopping and 
looking back upon the past. And I 
wish, as if I had never done it before, 
to bear witness, not only that it is by 
the grace of God, but that it is by the 
grace of God, as manifested in Christ 
Jesus, that I am what I am. I recog- 
nize the sublimity and grandeur of the 
revelation of God in His eternal father- 
hood as one that made the heavens, 
that founded the earth, and that regards 
all the tribes of the earth, compre- 
hending them in one universal mercy ; 
but it is the God that is manifested 
in Jesus Christ, revealed by His life, 
made known by the inflections of His 



202 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

feelings, by His discourse, and by His 
deeds — it is that God that I desire to 
confess to-night, and of whom I desire 
to say, 'By the love of God in Christ 
Jesus I am what I am.' 

" If you ask me precisely what I 
mean by that, I say, frankly, that 
more than any recognized influence of 
my father or my mother upon me; 
more than the social influence of all 
the members of my father's household, 
more, so far as I can trace it, or so far 
as I am made aware of it, than all the 
social influences of every kind, Christ 
has had the formation of my mind and 
my disposition. My hidden ideals of 
what is beautiful I have drawn from 
Christ My thoughts of what is 



THE ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCE. 20$ 

manly, and noble, and pure, have 
almost all of them arisen from the 
Lord Jesus Christ. Many men have 
educated themselves by reading Plu- 
tarch's Lives of the Ancient Worthies, 
and setting before themselves one and 
another of these that in different ages 
have achieved celebrity ; and they 
have recognized the great power of 
these men. on themselves. 'Now I do 
not perceive that poet, or philosopher, 
or reformer, or general, or any other 
great man, ever has dwelt in my imagi- 
nation and in my thought as the simple 
Jesus has. For more than twenty-five 
years I instinctively have gone to Christ 
to draw a measure and a rule for every- 
thing. Whenever there has been a 



204 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

necessity for it, I have sought — and at 
last almost spontaneously — to throw 
myself into the companionship of 
Christ; and early, by my imagination, 
I could see Him standing and looking 
quietly and lovingly upon me. There 
seemed almost to drop from His face 
an influence upon me that suggested 
what was the right thing in the con- 
trolling of passion, in the subduing of 
pride, in the overcoming of selfishness ; 
and it is from Christ, manifested to my 
inward eye, that I have consciously 
derived more ideals, more models, 
more influences, than any other human 
character whatever. 

"That is not all. I feel conscious 
that I have derived from the Lord 



THE ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCE. 205 

Jesus Christ every thought that 
makes heaven a reality to me, and 
every thought that paves the road that 
lies between me and heaven. All my 
conceptions of the progress of grace 
in the soul ; all the steps by which 
divine life is evolved ; all the ideals 
that overhang the blessed sphere which 
awaits us beyond this world — these 
are derived from the Saviour. The life 
that I now live in the flesh I live by 
the faith of the Son of God. 

" That is not all. Much as my 
future includes all these elements 
which go to make the blessed fabric 
of earthly life, yet. after all, what the 
summer is compared with all its 
earthly products — flowers, and leaves, 



206 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

and grass — that is Christ compared 
with all the products of Christ in 
my mind and in my soul. All 
the flowers and leaves of sympa- 
thy; all the twining joys that come 
from my heart as a Christian — 
these I take and hold in the future, 
but they are to me what the flowers 
and leaves of summer are compared 
with the sun that makes the summer. 
Christ is the Alpha and -Omega, the 
beginning and the end of my better 
life. 

" When T read the Bible, I gather a 
great deal from the Old Testament, 
and from the Pauline portions of the 
New Testament; but after all, I am 
conscious that the fruit of the Bible 



THE ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCE. 20/ 

is Christ. That is what I read it for, 
and that is what I find that is worth 
reading. I have had a hunger to be 
loved of Christ. You all know, in 
some relations, what it is to be hungry 
for love. Your heart seems unsatisfied 
till you can draw something more 
toward you from those that are dearest 
to you. There have been times when 
I have had an unspeakable heart- 
hunger for Christ's love. My sense 
of sin is never strong when I think of 
the law ; my sense of sin is strong 
when I think of love — if there is any 
difference between law and love. It 
is when drawing near the Lord Jesus 
Christ, and longing to be loved, that I 
have the most vivid sense of unsym- 



208 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

metry, of imperfection, of absolute 
unworthiness, and of my sinfulness. 
Character and conduct are never so 
vividly set before me as when in 
silence I bend in the presence of 
Christ, revealed not in wrath, but in 
love to me. I never so much long to 
be lovely, that I may be loved, as 
when I have this revelation of Christ 
before my mind. 

"In looking back upon my experi- 
ence, that part of my life which stands 
out, and which I remember most 
vividly, is just that part that has had 
some conscious association with Christ. 
All the rest is pale, and thin, and lies 
like clouds on the horizon. Doctrines, 
systems, measures, methods — what 



THE ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCE. 2(X) 

may be called the necessary mechani- 
cal and external part of worship ; the 
part which the senses would recog- 
nize — this seems to have withered and 
fallen off like leaves of last summer; 
but that part which has taken hold of 
Christ abides." 

Can any one hear this life-music, 
with its throbbing refrain of Christ, 
and remain unmoved by envy or 
desire ? Yet, till we have lived like 
this we have never lived at all. 



2IO THE CHANGED LIFE, 



THE FIRST EXPERIMENT. 



HPHEN you reduce religion to a 
1 common Friendship ? A com- 
mon Friendship — who talks of a com- 
mon Friendship ? There is no such 
thing in the world. On earth no word 
is more sublime. Friendship is the 
nearest thing we know to what religion 
is. God is love. And to make reli- 
gion akin to Friendship is simply to 
give it the highest expression con- 
ceivable by man. But if by demur- 
ring to " a common friendship " is 
meant a protest against the greatest 



THi2 FIRST EXPERIMENT. 211 

and the holiest in religion being spoken 
of in intelligible terms, then I am 
afraid the objection is all too real. 
Men always look for a mystery when 
one talks of sanctification ; some mys- 
tery apart from that w r hich must ever 
be mysterious wherever Spirit works. 
It is thought some peculiar secret 
lies behind it, some occult experience 
which only the initiated know. Thou- 
sands of persons go to church every 
Sunday hoping to solve this mystery. 
At meetings, at conferences, many a 
time they have reached what they 
thought was the very brink of it, but 
somehow no further revelation came. 
Poring over religious books, how often 
were they not within a paragraph of 



212 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

it; the next page, the next sentence, 
would discover all, and they would be 
borne on a flowing tide forever. But 
nothing happened. The next sentence 
and the next page were read, and 
still it eluded them ; and though the 
promise of its coming kept faithfully 
up to the end, the last chapter found 
them still pursuing. Why did nothing 
happen ? Because there was nothing 
to happen — nothing of the kind they 
were looking for. Why did it elude 
them? Because there was no "it" 
When shall we learn that the pursuit 
of holiness is simply the pursuit of 
Christ ? When shall we substitute for 
the " it " of a fictitious aspiration, the 
approach to a Living Friend ? Sane- 



THE FIRST EXPERIMENT. 213 

tity is in character and not in moods ; 
Divinity in our own plain calm human- 
ity, and in no mystic rapture of the 
soul. 

And yet there are others who, for 
exactly a contrary reason, will find 
scant satisfaction here. Their com- 
plaint is not that a religion expressed 
in terms of Friendship is too homely, 
but that it is still too mystical. To 
"abide" in Christ, to " make Christ 
our most constant companion," is to 
them the purest mysticism. They 
want something absolutely tangible 
and absolutely direct. These are not 
the poetical souls who seek a sign, a 
mysticism in excess ; but the prosaic 
natures whose want is mathematical 



214 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

definition in details. Yet it is perhaps 
not possible to reduce this problem 
to much more rigid elements. The 
beauty of Friendship is its infinity. 
One can never evacuate life of mysti- 
cism. Home is full of it, love is full 
of it, religion is full of it. Why 
stumble at that in the relation of man 
to Christ which is natural in the rela- 
tion of man to man ? 

If any one cannot conceive or real- 
ize a mystical relation with Christ, per- 
haps all that can be done is to help 
him to step on to it by still plainer 
analogies from common life. How do 
I know Shakespeare or Dante ? By 
communing with their words and 
thoughts. Many men know Dante 



THE FIRST EXPERIMENT. 21 5 

better than their own fathers. He 
influences them more. As a spiritual 
presence he is more near to them, as 
a spiritual force more real. Is there 
any reason why a greater than Shake- 
speare or Dante, who also walked this 
earth, who left great words behind 
Him, who has greater works every- 
where in the world now, should not 
also instruct, inspire, and mould the 
characters of men ? I do not limit 
Christ's influence to this. It is this, 
and it is more. But Christ, so far 
from resenting or discouraging this 
relation of Friendship, Himself pro- 
posed it. " Abide in me " was almost 
His last word to the world. And He 
partly met the difficulty of those who 



2l6 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

feel its intangibleness by adding the 
practical clause, " If ye abide in Me 
and My words abide in you." 

Begin with His words. Words can 
scarcely ever be long impersonal. 
Christ Himself was a Word, a word 
made Flesh. Make His words flesh ; 
do them, live them, and you must live 
Christ. "He that keepeth My com- 
mandments, he it is that loveth Me." 
Obey Him and you must love Him. 
Abide in Him and you must obey Him. 
Cultivate His Friendship. Live after 
Christ, in His Spirit, as in His Pres- 
ence, and it is difficult to think what 
more you can do. Take this at least 
as a first lesson, as introduction. If 
you cannot at once and always feel 



THE FIRST EXPERIMENT. 217 

the play of His life upon yours, watch 
for it also indirectly. "The whole 
earth is full of the character of the 
Lord." Christ is the Light of the 
world, and much of His Light is 
reflected from things in the world — 
even from clouds. Sunlight is stored 
in every leaf, from leaf through coal, 
and it comforts us thence when days 
are dark and we cannot see the sun. 
Christ shines through men, through 
books, through history, through nature, 
music, art. Look for Him there. 
"Every day one should either look at 
a beautiful picture, or hear beautiful 
music, or read a beautiful poem." 
The real danger of mysticism is no* 
making it broad enough. 



2l8 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

Do not think that nothing is happen- 
ing because you do not see yourself 
grow, or hear the whir of the ma- 
chinery. All great things grow noise- 
lessly. You can see a mushroom 
grow, but never a child. Mr. Darwin 
tells us that Evolution proceeds by 
" numerous, successive, and slight 
modifications." Paul knew that, and 
put it, only in more beautiful words, 
into the heart of his formula. He 
said for the comforting of all slowly 
perfecting souls that they grew "from 
character to character." "The in- 
ward man," he says elsewhere, "is 
renewed from day to day." All 
^.horough work is slow ; all true devel- 
opment by minute, slight, and insen- 



THE FIRST EXPERIMENT. 219 

sible metamorphoses. The higher the 
structure, moreover, the slower the 
progress. As the biologist runs his 
eye over the long Ascent of Life he 
sees the lowest forms of animals de- 
velop in an hour ; the next above these 
reach maturity in a day ; those higher 
still take weeks or months to perfect; 
but the few at the top demand the long 
experiment of years. If a child and 
an ape are born on the same day, the 
last will be in full possession of its fac- 
ulties and doing the active work of 
life before the child has left its cradle. 
Life is the cradle of eternity. As the 
man is to the animal in the slowness of 
his evolution, so is the spiritual man to 
the natural man. Foundations which 



2ZO THE CHANGED LIFE. 

have to bear the weight of an eternal 
life must be surely laid. Character is 
to wear forever ; who will wonder or 
grudge that it cannot be developed in 
a day ? 

To await the growing of a soul, 
nevertheless, is an almost Divine act 
of faith. How pardonable, surely, the 
impatience of deformity with itself, 
of a consciously despicable character 
standing before Christ, wondering, 
yearning, hungering to be like that! 
Yet must one trust the process fear- 
lessly, and without misgiving. "The 
Lord the Spirit " will do His part. 
The tempting expedient is, in haste 
for abrupt or visible progress, to try 
some method less spiritual, or to defeat 



THE FIRST EXPERIMENT. 221 

the end by watching for effects instead 
of keeping the eye on the Cause. A 
photograph prints from the negative 
only while exposed to the sun. While 
the artist is looking to see how it is 
getting on he simply stops the getting 
on. Whatever of wise supervision the 
soul may need, it is certain it can 
never be over-exposed, or that, being 
exposed, anything else in the world 
can improve the result or quicken it. 
The creation of a new heart, the 
renewing of a right spirit, is an om- 
nipotent work of God. Leave it to the 
Creator. " He which hath begun a 
good work in you will perfect it unto 
that day." 

No man, nevertheless, who feels the 



222 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

worth and solemnity of what is at 
stake will be careless as to his prog- 
ress. To become like Christ is the 
only thing in the world worth caring 
for, the thing before which every am- 
bition of man is folly, and all lower 
achievement vain. Those only who 
make this quest the supreme desire and 
passion of their lives can ever begin to 
hope to reach it. If, therefore, it has 
seemed up to this point as if all de- 
pended on passivity, let me now assert, 
with conviction more intense, that all 
depends on activity. A religion of 
effortless adoration may be a religion 
for an angel, but never for a man. 
Not in the contemplative, but in the 
active, lies true hope ; not in rapture. 



THE FIRST EXPERIMENT. 223 

but in reality, lies true life ; not in the 
realm of ideals, but among tangible 
things, is man's sanctification wrought. 
Resolution, effort, pain, seif-crucifixion, 
agony — all the things already dis- 
missed as futile in themselves must 
now be restored to office, and a tenfold 
responsibility laid upon them. For 
what is their office ? Nothing less than 
to move the vast inertia of the soul % 
and place it, and keep it where the 
spiritual forces will act upon it. It is 
to rally the forces of the will, and 
keep the surface of the mirror bright 
and ever in position. It is to uncover 
the face which is to look at Christ, and 
draw down the veil when unhallowed 
sights are near. You have, perhaps, 



224 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

gone with an astronomer to watch him 
photograph the spectrum of a star. 
As you entered the dark vault of the 
observatory you saw him begin by 
lighting a candle. To see the star 
with ? No ; but to see to adjust the 
instrument to see the star with. It was 
the star that was going to take the pho- 
tograph ; it was, also, the astronomer. 
For a long time he worked in the 
dimness, screwing tubes and polishing 
lenses and adjusting reflectors, and 
only after much labor the finely 
focussed instrument was brought to 
bear. Then he blew out the light, 
and left the star to do its wo^k upon 
the plate alone. The day's task for 
the Christian is to bring his instrument 



THE FIRST EXPERIMENT. 225 

to bear. Having done that he may- 
blow out his candle. All the evidences 
of Christianity which have brought 
him there, all aids to Faith, all acts 
of worship, all the leverages of the 
Church, all Prayer and Meditation, all 
girding of the Will — these lesser proc- 
esses, these candle-light activities for 
that supreme hour, may be set aside. 
But, remember, it is but for an hour. 
The wise man will be he who quickest 
lights his candle ; the wisest he who 
never lets it out. To-morrow, the 
next moment, he, a poor, darkened* 
blurred soul, may need it again to 
focus the Image better, to take a 
mote off the lens, to clear the mirror 
irom a breath with which the world 
has dulled it. 



2 26 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

No readjustment is ever required on 
behalf of the Star. That is one great 
fixed point in this shifting universe. 
But the world moves. And each day, 
each hour, demands a further motion 
and readjustment for the soul. A tel- 
escope in an observatory follows a 
star by clockwork, but the clockwork 
of the soul is called the Will. Hena**, 
while the soul in passivity reflects the 
Image of the Lord, the Will in intense 
activity holds the mirror in position 
lest the drifting motion of the world 
bear it beyond the line of vision. To 
" follow Christ" is largely to keep f .he 
soul in such position as will allow for 
the motion of the earth. And fh\<? 
calculated counteracting of the mow 



THE FIRST EXPERIMENT. 227 

ments of the world, this holding of the 
mirror exactly opposite to the Mirrored, 
this steadying of the faculties unerr- 
ingly through cloud and earthquake, 
fire and sword, is the stupendous co- 
operating labor of the Will. It is all 
man's work. It is all Christ's work. 
In practice it is both; in theory it is 
both. But the wise man will say in 
practice, "It depends upon myself." 

In the Galerie des Beaux Arts in 
I v aris there stands a famous statue. It 
was the last work of a great genius, 
who, like many a genius, was very 
poor and lived in a garret, which 
served as a studio and sleeping-room 
alike. When the statue was all but 
finished, one midnight a sudden frost 



228 THE CHANGED LIFE. 

fell upon Paris. The sculptor lay 
awake in the fireless room and thought 
of the still moist clay, thought how the 
water would freeze in the pores and 
destroy in an hour the dream of his 
life. So the old man rose from his 
couch and heaped the bed-clothes 
reverently round his work. In the 
morning when the neighbors entered 
the room the sculptor was dead. But 
the statue lived. 

The Image of Christ that is forming 
within us — that is life's one charge. 
Let every project stand aside for that. 
'•'Till Christ be formed," no man's 
work is finished, no religion crowned, 
no life has fulfilled its end. Is the in- 
finite task begun ? When, how, are 



THE FIRST EXPERIMENT. 229 

we to be different ? Time cannot 
change men. Death cannot change 
men. Christ can. Wherefore put on 
Christ. 



" FIRST P 

A TALK WITH BOYS. 



"FIRST!" 

HAVE three heads to give you. 

The first is "Geography," the sec- 
ond is "Arithmetic," and the third is 
" Grammar." 

Geography. 

First. Geography tells us where to 
find places. Where is the kingdom 
of God ? It is said that when a Prus- 
sian officer was killed in the Franco- 
Prussian war, a map of France was 
very often found in his pocket. When 



234 "first!" 

we wish to occupy a country, we ought 
to know its geography. Now, where 
is the kingdom of God? A boy over 
there says, " It is in heaven.' ' No, it 
is not in heaven. Another boy says, 
"It is in the Bible." No; it is not in 
the Bible. Another boy says, " It 
must be in the Church." No; it is 
not in the Church. Heaven is only 
the capital of the kingdom of God ; the 
Bible is the Guide-book to it ; the 
Church is the weekly Parade of those 
who belong to it. If you would turn 
to the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke 
you will find out where the kingdom of 
God really is. " The kingdom of God 
is within you " — within you. The king- 
dom of God is inside people. 



GEOGRAPHY. 235 

I remember once taking a walk by 
the river near where the Falls of 
Niagara are, and I noticed a remark- 
able figure walking along the river 
bank. I had been some time in 
America. I had seen black men, and 
red men, and yellow men, and white 
men ; black men, the Negroes ; red 
men, the Indians ; yellow men, the 
Chinese ; white men, the Americans. 
But this man looked different in his 
dress from anything I had ever seen. 
When he came a little closer, I saw 
he was wearing a kilt ; when he came 
a little nearer still, I saw that he was 
dress'ed exactly like a Highland sol- 
dier. When he came quite near, I 
said to him, "What are you doing 



236 " FIRST 



here ? " " Why should I not be here ? " 
he said. " Don't you know this is 
British soil ? When you cross the 
river you come into Canada.'' This 
soldier was thousands of miles from 
England, and yet he was in the king- 
dom of England. Wherever there is 
an English heart beating loyal to the 
Queen of Britain, there is England. 
Wherever there is a boy whose heart 
is loyal to the King of the kingdom cf 
God, the kingdom of God is within 
him. 

What is the kingdom of God ? 
Every kingdom has its exports, its 
products. Go down to the river here, 
and you will find ships coming in with 
cotton; you know they come from 



GEOGRAPHY. 237 

America. You will find ships with 
tea; vou know they are from China- 
Ships with wool ; you know they come 
from Australia. Ships with sugar; 
you know they come from Java. 
What comes from the kingdom of God ? 
Again we must refer to our Guide- 
book. Turn to Romans, and we shall 
find what the kingdom of God is. I 
w : \l read it: " The kingdom of God is 
righteousness, peace, joy" — three 
things. " The kingdom of God is^ 
righteousness, peace, joy." Right- 
eousness, of course, is just doing what 
is right. Any boy who does what is, 
right has the kingdom of God within 
him. Any boy who, instead of being 
quarrelsome, lives at peace with other 



238 '* FIRST !" 

boys, has the kingdom of God within 
him. Any boy whose heart is filled 
with joy because he does what is right, 
has the kingdom of God within him. 
The kingdom of God is not going to 
religious meetings, and hearing strange 
religious experiences : the kingdom of 
God is doing what is right- — living at 
peace with all men, being filled with 
joy in the Holy Ghost. 

Boys, if you are going to be Chris- 
tians, be Christians as boys, and not 
as your grandmothers. A grand- 
mother has to be a Christian as a 
grandmother, and that is the right and 
the beautiful thing for her ; but if you 
cannot read your Bible by the hour 
as your grandmother can, or delight 



GEOGRAPHY. 239 

in meetings as she can, don't think 
you are necessarily a bad boy. When 
you are your grandmother's age you 
will have your grandmother's kind of 
religion. Meantime, be a Christian 
as a boy. Live a boy's life. Do the 
straight thing ; seek the kingdom of 
righteousness and honor and truth. 
Keep the peace with the boys about 
you, and be filled with the joy of being 
a loyal, and simple, and natural, and 
boy-like servant of Christ. 

You can very easily tell a house, or 
workshop, or an office where the king- 
dom of God is not. The first thing 
you see in that place is that the 
"straight thing" is not always done. 
Customers do not get fair play. You 



240 "first!" 

are in danger of learning to cheat and 
to lie. Better, a thousand times, to 
starve than to stay in a place where 
you cannot do what is right. 

Or, when you go into your workshop, 
you find everybody sulky, touchy, and 
ill-tempered ; everybody at daggers 
drawn with everybody else ; some of 
the men not on speaking terms with 
some of the others, and the whole feel 
of the place miserable and unhappy. 
The kingdom of God is not there, for 
it is peace. It is the kingdom of the 
Devil that is anger and wrath and 
malice. 

If you want to get the kingdom of 
God into your workshop, or into your 
home, let the quarrelling be stopped. 



GEOGRAPHY. 24 1 

Live in peace and harmony and broth- 
erliness with every one. For the 
kingdom of God is the kingdom of 
brothers. It is a great society, founded 
by Jesus Christ, of all the people who 
try to be like Him, and live to make 
the world better and sweeter and hap- 
pier. Wherever a boy is trying to 
do that, in the house or in the street, 
in the workshop or on the baseball 
field, there is the kingdom of God. 
And every boy, however small or ob- 
scure or poor, who is seeking that, is a 
member of it. You see now, I hope, 
what the kingdom is. 

Arithmetic. 
I pass, therefore, to the second 
head: What was it? " Arithmetic.' " 



242 " FIRST ! " 

Are there any arithmetic words in this 
text ? " Added," says one boy. Quite 
right, added. What other arithmetic 
word ? " First" Yes, first — « first," 
" added." Now, don't you think you 
could not have anything better to seek 
" first " than the things I have named — 
to do what is right, to live at peace, 
and be always making those about 
you happy ? You see at once why 
Christ tells us to seek these things 
first — because they are the best worth 
seeking. Do you know anything 
better than these three things, any- 
thing happier, purer, nobler ? If you 
do, seek them first. But if you do 
not, seek first the kingdom of God. 
I am not here this afternoon to tell 



ARITHMETIC. 243 

you to be religious. You know- 
that. I am not here to tel 1 you 
to seek the kingdom of God. I have 
come to tell you to seek the kingdom 
of God first. First. Not many . peo- 
ple do that. They put a little religion 
into their life — once a week, perhaps. 
They might just as well let it alone. 
It is not worth seeking the kingdom of 
God unless we seek it first. Suppose 
you take the helm out of a ship and 
hang it over the bow, and send that 
ship to sea, will it ever reach the other 
side? Certainly not. It will drift 
about anyhow. Keep religion in its 
place, and it will take you straight 
through life, and straight to your 
bather in heaven when life is over. 



244 " first! " 

But if you do not put it in its place, 
you may just as well have nothing to 
do with it. Religion out of its place 
in a human life is the most miserable 
thing in the world. There is nothing 
that requires so much to be kept in its 
place as religion, and its place is what ? 
second? third? " First." Boys, carry 
that home with you to-day — first the 
kingdom of God. Make it so that it 
will be natural to you to think about 
that the very first thing. 

There was a boy in Glasgow ap- 
prenticed to a gentleman who made 
telegraphs. The gentleman told me 
this himself. One day this boy was 
up on the top of a four-story house 
with a number of men fixing up a 



ARITHMETIC. 245 

telegiaph wire. The work was all 
but done. It was getting late, and the 
men said they were going away home, 
and the boy was to nip off the ends of 
the wire himself. Before going down 
they told him to be sure to go back to 
the workshop, when he was finished, 
with his master's tools. " Do not 
leave any of them lying about, what- 
ever you do," said the foreman. The 
boy climbed up the pole and began to 
nip off the ends of the wire. It was a 
very cold winter night, and the dusk 
was gathering. He lost his hold and 
fell upon the slates, slid down, and then 
over and over to the ground below. 
A clothes-rope, stretched across the 
u green " on to which he was just about 



246 " first!"" 

to fall, caught him on the chest and 
broke his fall ; but the shock was ten 
rible, and he lay unconscious among 
some clothes upon the green. An old 
woman came out; seeing her rope 
broken and the clothes all soiled, 
thought the boy was drunk, shook him, 
scolded him, and went for the police- 
man. And the boy with the shaking 
came back to consciousness, rubbed 
his eyes, and got upon his feet. What 
do you think he did? He staggered, 
half blind, away up the stairs. He 
climbed the ladder. He got on to the 
roof of the house. He gathered up 
his tools, put them into his basket, 
took them down, and when he got to 
the ground again, fainted dead away. 



ARITHMETIC. 247 

Just then the policeman came, saw 
there was something seriously wrong, 
and carried him away to the hospital, 
where he lay for some time. I am glad 
to say he got better. What was his 
first thought at that terrible moment? 
His duty. He was not thinking of 
himself; he was thinking about his 
master. First, the kingdom of God. 
But there is another arithmetic word. 
What is it? "Added." There is not 
one boy here who does not know the 
difference between addition and sub- 
traction. Nov/, that is a very impor- 
tant difference, in religion, because — 
and it is a ve^y strange thing — very 
few people Vnow the difference when 
they begin to talk about religion. 



24 3 "first!" 

They often tell boys thai if they seek 
the kingdom of God, everything else 
is going to be subtracted from them 
They tell them that they are going 
to become gloomy, miserable, and will 
lose everything that makes a boy's 
life worth living — that they will have 
to stop baseball and story-books, and 
become little old men, and spend all 
their time in going to meetings and in 
singing hymns. Now, that is not true. 
Christ never said anything like that. 
Christ says we are to " seek first the 
kingdom of God," and everything else 
worth having is to be added unto 
us. If there is anything I would like 
you to take away with you this after- 
noon, it is these two arithmetii vwrcfo- 



ARITHMETIC. 249 

" first" and "added." I do not mean 
by added that if you become religious 
yon are all going to become rich. 
Here is a boy, who, in sweeping out 
the shop to-morrow morning, finds 
sixpence lying among the orange- 
boxes. Well, nobody has missed it. 
He puts it in his pocket, and it begins 
to burn a hole there. By breakfast- 
time he wishes that sixpence were in 
his master's pocket And by and by 
he goes to his master. He says (to 
himself, and not to his master,) " I 
was at the Boys r Brigade yesterday, 
and I was to seek first that which was 
right." Then he says to his master, 
" Please, sir, here is sixpence that I 
found utDon the floor-" The master 



250 " FIRST !" 

puts it in the "till." What has the 
boy got in his pocket? Nothing; but 
he has got the kingdom of God. in his 
heart. He has laid up treasure in 
heaven, which is of infinitely more 
worth than sixpence. Now, that boy 
does not find a shilling on his way 
home. I have known that happen,, 
but that is not what is meant by " add- 
ing.'* It does not mean that God is 
going to pay him in his own coin, for 
He pays in better coin. 

Yet I remember once hearing of a 
boy who was paid in both ways. He 
was very, very poor. He lived in a 
foreign country, and his mother said to 
him one day that he must go into the 
great city and start in business, and she 



ARITHMETIC. 25 1 

took his coat and cut it open and 
sewed between the lining and the coat 
forty golden dinars, which she had 
saved up for many years to start him 
in life. She told him to take care of 
robbers as he went across the desert; 
and as he was going out of the door 
she said : " My boy, I have only two 
words for you — ' Fear God, and never 
tell a lie/ " The boy started off, and 
toward evening he saw glittering in 
the distance the minarets of the great 
city, but between the city and himself 
he saw a cloud of di^t, it came nearer ; 
presently he saw thzt it was a band of 
robbers. One of fae robbers left the 
rest and rode toward him, and said: 
'*' Boy, what hav^ you got? " And the 



252 " FIRST ! " 

boy looked him in the face and said: 
" I have forty golden dinars sewed up 
in my coat." And the robber laughed 
and wheeled round his horse and rode 
away back. He would not believe the 
boy. Presently another robber came, 
and he said : " Boy, what have you 
got ? " " Forty golden dinars sewed up 
in my coat." The robber said: " The 
boy is a fool," and wheeled his horse 
and rode away back. By and by the 
robber captain came, and he said : 
" Boy, what have you got? " " I have 
forty golden dinars sewed up in my 
coat." And the robber dismounted 
and put his hand over the boy's breast, 
felt something round, counted one, 
two, three, four, five, till he counted 



ARITHMETIC. 253 

out the forty golden coin. He looked 
the boy in the face, and said : " Why 
did you tell me that ? " The boy said : 
" Because of God and my mother.'' 
And the robber leaned on his spear 
and thought, and said : " Wait a 
moment" He mounted his horse, 
rode back to the rest of the robbers, 
and came back in about five minutes 
with his dress changed. This time 
he looked not like a robber, but like a 
merchant. He took the boy up on his 
horse and said : " My boy, I have 
long wanted to do something for my 
God and for my mother, and I have 
this moment renounced my robber's 
life. I am also a merchant. I have 
a large business house in the city. 



254 "first!" 

I want you to come and live with 
me, to teach me about your God ; and 
you will be rich, and your mother 
some day will come and live with us." 
And it all happened. By seeking first 
the kingdom of God, all these things 
were added unto him. , 

Boys, banish for ever from your 
minds the idea that religion is subtrac- 
tion. It does not tell us to give things 
up, but rather gives us something so 
much better that they give themselves 
up. When you see a boy on the 
street whipping a top, you know, per- 
haps, that you could not make that 
boy happier than by giving him a top, 
a whip, and half an hour to whip it. 
But next birthday, when he looks back, 



ARITHMETIC. 255 

kj says, "What a goose I was last 
year to be delighted with a top ; what 
I want now is a baseball bat." Then 
when he becomes an old man he does 
not care in the least for a baseball bat ; 
he wants rest, and a snug fireside, and 
a newspaper every day. He wonders 
how he could ever have taken up his 
thoughts with baseball bats and whip- 
ping tops. Now, when a boy becomes 
a Christian, he grows out of the evil 
things one by one — that is to say, if 
they are really evil — which he used to 
s^t his heart upon (of course I do not 
mean baseball bats, for they are not 
evils); and so instead of telling people 
to give up things, we are safer to tell 
them to "seek first the kingdom of 



250 "first!" 

God/' and then they will get new 
things and better things, and the old 
things will drop off of themselves. 
This is what is meant by the "new 
heart.' , It means that God puts into 
us new thoughts and new wishes, and 
we become quite different boys. 

Grammar. 

Lastly, and very shortly. Whrt 
was the third head? " Grammar. '' 
Right : Grammar. Now, I require a 
clever boy to answer the next question. 
What is the verb? "Seek." Very 
good: "Seek." What mood is it in? 
" Imperative mood." What does that 
mean? " Command." You boys of 
the Boys' Brigade know what com- 



GRAMMAR. Z-7 

mands are. What is the soldier's first 
lesson ? " Obedience." Have you 
obeyed this command ? Remember 
the imperative mood of these words, 
" Seek first the kingdom of God." 
This is the command of your King. 
It must be done. I have been trying 
to show you what a splendid thing it 
is ; what a reasonable thing it is ; what 
a happy thing it is ; but beyond 
all these reasons it is a thing that 
must be done, because we are com- 
manded to do it by our Captain. It is 
one of the finest things about the Boys* 
Brigade that it always appeals to 
Christ as its highest officer, and takes 
its commands from Him. Now, there 
is His command to seek first the king- 



258 "first!" 

dom of God. Have you done it ? 
"Well," I know some boys will say, 
"we are going to have a good time, 
enjoy life, and then we are going to 
seek — last — the kingdom of God." 
Now that is mean; it is nothing else 
than mean for a boy to take all the 
good gifts that God has given him, 
and then give Him nothing back in 
return but his wasted life. 

God wants boys' lives, not only their 
souls. It is for active service soldiers 
are drilled and trained and fed and 
armed. That is why you and I are 
in the world at all — not to prepare to 
go out of it some day; but to serve 
God actively in it now. It is mon- 
strous and shameful and cowardly to 



GRAMMAR. 2 $9 

talk of seeking the kingdom last. It 
is shirking duty, abandoning one's 
rightful post, playing into the enemy's 
hand by doing nothing to turn his 
flank. Every hour a kingdom is com- 
ing in your heart, in your home, in the 
world near you, be it a kingdom of 
darkness or a kingdom of light. You 
are placed where you are, in a partic- 
ular business, in a particular street, to 
help on there the kingdom of God. 
You cannot do that when you are old 
and ready to die. By that time your 
companions will have fought their 
fight, and lost or won. If they lose, 
will you not be sorry that you did not 
help them ? Will you not regret that 
only at the last you helped the king- 



260 " FIRST ! " 

dom of God ? Perhaps you will not 
be able to do it then. And then your 
life has been lost indeed. 

Very few people have the opportu- 
nity to seek the kingdom of God at 
the end. Christ, knowing all that, 
knowing that religion was a thing for 
our life, not merely for our death-bed, 
has laid this command upon us now : 
" Seek jirst the kingdom of God." I 
am going to leave you with this text 
itself. Every Brigade boy in the 
world should obey it. 

Boys, before you go to work to- 
morrow, before you go to sleep to-night, 
before you go to the Sunday-school 
this afternoon, before you go out of the 
door of the City Hall, resolve that, 



GRAMMAR. 26 1 

3od helping you, you are going to 
seek first the kingdom of God. Per 
; :aps some boys here are deserters; 
they began once before to serve Christ, 
and they deserted. Come back again, 
come back again to-day. Others have 
never enlisted at all. Will you not do 
it now ? You are old enough to de- 
cide. And the grandest moment of a 
boy's life is that moment when he 
decides to 

&ttk first tije fcingUom of ffiolr. 



HOW TO LEARN HOW. 

I. DEALING WITH DOUBT. 

II. PREFARAVION FOR LEARNING. 



DEALING WITH DOUBT. 



r T^HERE is a subject which I think 
A we as workers amongst young 
men cannot afford to keep out of 
sight — I mean the subject of " Doubt." 
We are forced to face that subject. 
We have no choice. I wouW rather 
Ibt it alone; but every day of my life 
I meet men who doubt, and I am 
quite sure that most of you have 
innumerable interviews every year with 
men who raise skeptical difficulties 
about religion. Now, it becomes a 
matter of great practical imp'^^nce 

26 c 



266 DEALING WITH DOUBT. 

that we should know how to deal 
wisely with these men. Upon the 
whole, I think these are the best men 
in the country. I speak of my own 
country. I speak of the universities 
with which I am familiar, and I say 
that the men who are perplexed — the 
men who come to you with serious 
and honest difficulties — are the best 
men. They are men of intellectual 
honesty, and cannot allow themselves 
to be put to rest by words, or phrases, 
or traditions, or theologies, but who 
must get to the bottom of things for 
themselves. And if I am not mis- 
taken, Christ was very fond of these 
men. The outsiders always interested 
Him, and touched Him. The ortho 



DEALING WITH DOUBT. 267 

dox people — the Pharisees — He was 
much less interested in. He went with 
publicans and sinners — with people 
who were in revolt against the respect- 
ability, intellectual and religious, of 
the day. And following Him, we are 
entitled to give sympathetic considera- 
tion to those whom He loved and took 
trouble with. 

First, let me speak for a moment or 
two about the origin of doubt. In the 
first place, we are born questioners. 
Look at the wonderment of a little 
child in its eyes before it can speak. 
The child's great word when it begins 
to speak is, " Why ? " Every child is 
full of every kind of questions, about 
every kind of thing that moves, and 



268 DEALING WITH DOUBT. 

shines, and changes, in the little worlrl 
in which it lives. That is the in 
cipient doubt in the nature of man. 
Respect doubt for its origin. It is an 
inevitable thing. It is not a thing to 
be crushed. It is a part of man as 
God made him. Heresy is truth in 
the making, and doubt is the prelude 
of knowledge. 

Secondly : The world is a Sphinx. 
It is a vast riddle — an unfathomable 
mystery ; and on every side there is 
temptation to questioning. In every 
leaf, in every cell of every leaf, there 
are a hundred problems. There are 
ten good years of a man's life in 
investigating what is in the leaf, and 
there are five good years more in 



DEALING WITH DOUET. 269 

investigating the things that are in the 
things that are in the leaf. God has 
planned the world to incite men tc 
intellectual activity. 

Thirdly : The instrument with which 
we attempt to investigate truth is im- 
paired. Some say it fell, and the 
glass is broken. Some say prejudice, 
heredity or sin, have spoiled its sight. 
and have blinded our eyes and dead- 
ened our ears. In any case the in- 
struments with which we work upon 
truth, even in the strongest men, are 
feeble and inadequate to their tremen- 
dous task. 

And in the fourth place, all reli- 
gious truths are doubtable. There is 
no absolute proof for any one of them. 



27O DEALING WITH DOUBT. 

Even that fundamental truth — the 
existence of a God — no man can prove, 
by reason. The ordinary proof for 
the existence of God involves either 
an assumption, -argument in a circle, 
or a contradiction. The impression 
of God is kept up by experience ; not 
by logic. And hence, when the ex- 
perimental religion of a man, of a 
community, or of a nation, wanes, 
religion wanes — their idea of God 
grows indistinct, and that man, com- 
munity or nation becomes infidel. 
Bear in mind, then, that all religious 
truths are doubtable — even those 
which we hold most strongly. 

What does this brief account of the 
origin of doubt teach us ? It teaches us 



DEALING WITH DOUBT. 27 1 

great intellectual humility. It teaches 
us sympathy and toleration with all men 
who venture upon the ocean of truth 
to find out a path through it for them- 
selves. Do you sometimes feel your- 
self thinking unkind things about your 
fellow-students who have intellectual 
difficulty ? I know how hard it is 
always to feel sympathy and toleration 
for them ; but we must address our- 
selves to that most carefully and most 
religiously. If my brother is short- 
sighted, I must not abuse him or speak 
against him ; I must pity him, and if 
possible try to improve his sight or to 
make things that he is to look at so 
bright that he cannot help seeing. 
But never let us think evil of men who 



2/2 DEALING WITH DOUBT 

do not see as we do. From the bot- 
tom of our hearts let us pity them, and 
let us take them by the hand and spend 
time and thought over them, and try 
to lead them to the true light. 

What has been the Church's treat* 
ment of doubt in the past ? It has 
been very simple. " There is a heretic. 
Burn him ! " That is all. " There is 
a man who has gone off the road. 
Bring him back and torture him ! " 
We have got past that physically ; 
have we got past it morally ? What 
does the modern Church say to a man 
who is skeptical ? Not " Burn him ! " 
but "Brand him!" "Brand him! — 
call him a bad name." And in many 
countries at the present time a man 



DEALING WITH DOUBT. 2/3 

who is branded as a heretic is despised, 
tabooed, and put out of religious so- 
ciety, much more than if he had gone 
wrong in morals. I think I am speak- 
ing within the facts when I say that a 
man who is unsound is looked upon in 
many communities with more suspicion 
and with more pious horror than a man 
who now and then gets drunk. " Burn 
him ! " " Brand him ! " " Excommu- 
nicate him ! " That has been the 
Church's treatment of doubt, and that 
is perhaps to some extent the treatment 
which we ourselves are inclined to give 
to the men who cannot see the truths 
of Christianity as we see them. Con- 
trast Christ's treatment of doubt. I 
have spoken already of His strange 



2/4 DEALING WITH DOUBT. 

partiality for the outsiders — lor the 
scattered heretics up and down the 
country; of the care with which He 
loved" to deal with them, and of the 
respect in which He held their intellec- 
tual difficulties. Christ never failed to 
distinguish between doubt and unbe- 
lief. Doubt is can't believe ; unbelief 
is won't believe. Doubt is honesty ; 
unbelief is obstinacy. Doubt is look- 
ing for light; unbelief is content with 
darkness. Loving darkness rather 
than light — that is what Christ at- 
tacked, and attacked unsparingly. 
But for the intellectual questioning of 
Thomas, and Philip, and Nicodemus, 
and the many others who came to Him 
to have their great problems solved, 



DEALING WITH DOUBT. 275 

He was respectful and generous and 
tolerant. 

And how did He meet their doubts ? 
The Church, as I have said, says, 
"Brand him ! " Christ said, " Teach 
him." He destroyed by fulfilling. 
When Thomas came to Him and de- 
nied His very resurrection, and stood 
before Him waiting for the scathing 
words and lashing for his unbelief, they 
never came. They never came. Christ 
gave him facts — facts. No man can 
go around facts. Christ said, " Behold 
My hands and My feet." The great 
god of science at the present time is a 
fact. It works with facts. Its cry is, 
" Give me facts." Found anything 
you like upon facts and w? will believe 



276 DEALING WITH DOUBT. 

it. The spirit of Christ was the scien- 
tific spirit. He founded His religion 
upon facts ; and He asked all men to 
found their religion upon facts. JM"ow. 
gentlemen, get up the facts of Chris- 
tianity, and take men to the facts. 
Theologies — and I am not speaking 
disrespectfully of theology ; theology 
is as scientific a thing as any other 
science of facts — but theologies are 
human versions of Divine truths, and 
hence the varieties of the versions, 
and the inconsistencies of them. I 
would allow a man to select whichever 
version of this truth he liked after- 
wards ; but I would ask him to begin 
with no version, but go back to the 
facts and base his Christian life upon 



DEALING WITH DOUBT. 2/7 

that. That is the great lesson of the 
New Testament way of looking at 
doubt — of Christ's treatment of doubt. 
It is not " Brand him ! " — but lovingly, 
wisely, and tenderly to teach him. 
Faith is never opposed to reason in the 
New Testament ; it is opposed to sight. 
You will find that a principle worth 
thinking over. Faitli is never opposed 
to reason in tlie New Testament, but to 
sight. 

Well, now ; with these principles in 
mind as to the origin of doubt, and as 
to Christ's treatment of it, how are we 
ourselves to deal with our fellow- 
students who are in intellectual diffi- 
culty ? In the first place, I think 
<ve must make all the concessions to 



2/8 DEALING WITH DOUBT. 

them that we conscientiously can. 
When a doubter first encounters you 
he pours out a deluge of abuse of 
cnurches, and ministers, and creeds, 
and Christians. Nine-tenths of what 
he says is probably true. Make con- 
cessions. Agree with him. It does 
him good to unburden himself of these 
things. He has been cherishing them 
for years — laying them up against 
Christians, against the Church, and 
against Christianity ; and now he is 
startled to find the first Christian with 
whom he has talked over the thing 
almost entirely agrees with him. We 
are, of course, not responsible for 
everything that is said in the name oi 
Christianity ; but a man does not give 



DEALING WITH DOUBT. 279 

up medicine because there are quack 
doctors, and no man has a right to 
give up his Christianity because there 
are spurious or inconsistent Christians. 
Then, as I have already said, creeds 
are human versions of Divine truths ; 
and we do not ask a man to accept all 
the creeds, any more than we ask him 
to accept all the Christians. We ask 
him to accept Christ, and the facts 
about Christ, and the words of Christ. 
But you will find the battle is half 
won when you have endorsed the man's 
objections, and possibly added a great 
many more to the charges which he 
has against ourselves. These men are 
in revolt against the kind of religion 
which we exhibit to the world — 



2vS'G DEALING WITH DOUBT. 

against the cant that is taught in the 
name of Christianity. And if the men 
that have never seen the real thing 
— if you could show them that, they 
would receive it as eagerly as you do. 
They are merely in revolt against the 
imperfections and inconsistencies of 
those who represent Christ to the 
world. 

Second : Beg them to set aside, by 
an act of will, all unsolved problems : 
such as the problem of the origin ol 
evil, the problem of the Trinity, the 
problem of the relation of human will 
and predestination, and so on — ■ prob- 
lems which have been investigated for 
thousands of years without result — ask 
them to set those problems aside as 



DEALING WITH DOUBT. 28 1 

insoiufaio in the meantime, just as a 
man who is studying mathematics may 
be asked to set aside the problem of 
squaring the circle. Let him go on 
with what can be done, and what has 
been done, and leave out of sight the 
impossible. You will find that will 
relieve the skeptic's mind of a great 
deal of unnecessary cargo that has been 
in his way. 

Thirdly : Talking about difficulties, 
as c rale, only aggravates them. En- 
tire satisfaction to the intellect is un- 
attainable about any of the greater 
problems, and if you try to get to the 
bottom of them by argument, there is 
no bottom there ; and, therefore, you 
make the matter worse. But I would 



282 DEALING WITH DOUBT. 

say what is known, and what can be 
honestly and philosophically and scien- 
tifically said about one or two of the 
difficulties that the doubter raises, just 
to show him that you can do it — to 
show him that you are not a fool- — that 
you are not merely groping in the dark 
yourself, but you have found whatever 
basis is possible. But I would not go 
around all the doctrines. I would 
simply do that with one or two ; be- 
cause the moment you cut ciT one, a 
hundred other heads will grow in its 
place. It would be a pity if all these 
problems could be solved. The joy of. 
the intellectual life would be largely 
gone. I would not rob a man of his 
problems; nor would I have another 



DEALING WITH DOUBT. 253 

man rob me of my problems. They 
are the delight of life, and the whole 
intellectual world would be stale and 
unprofitable if we knew everything. 

Fourthly — and this is the great point : 
Turn away from the reason, and go 
into the man's moral life. I don't 
mean, go into his moral life and see 
if the man is living in conscious sin, 
which is the great blinder of the eye s 
- — I am speaking now of honest doubt ; 
but open a new door into the practical 
side of man's nature. Entreat him 
not to postpone life and his life's use- 
fulness until he has settled the prob- 
lems of the universe. Tell him those 
problems will never all be settled ; that 
Ms life will be done before he has 



254 DEALING WITH DOUBT. 

begun to settle them ; and ask him 
what he is doing with his life mean- 
time. Charge him with wasting his 
life and his usefulness ; and invite him 
to deal with the moral and practical 
difficulties of the world, and leave the 
intellectual difficulties as he goes along. 
To spend time upon these is proving 
the less important before the more 
important ; and, as the French say, 
" The good is the enemy of the best." 
It is a good thing to think ; it is a bet- 
ter thing to work — it is a better thing 
to do good. And you have him there, 
you see. He can't get beyond that. 
You have to tell him, in fact, that there 
are two organs of knowledge : the 
one reason, the other obedience. And 



DEALING WITH DOUBT. 28 $ 

aow tell him, as he has tried the first 
and found the little in it, just for a 
moment or two to join you in trying 
the second. And when he asks whom 
he is to obey, you tell him there is but 
One, and lead him to the great Histori- 
cal figure, who calls all men to Him : 
the one perfect life — the one Saviour 
of mankind — the one Light of the 
world. Ask him to begin to obey 
Christ ; and, doing His will, he shall 
.now of the doctrine whether it be oic 
God. 

That, I think, is about the only 
thing you can do with a man : to get 
him into practical contact with the 
needs of the world, and to let him lose 
his intellectual difficulties meantime, 



286 DEALING WITH DOUBT. 

Don't ask him to give them up alto« 
gether. Tell him to solve them after- 
ward one by one if he can, but mean- 
time to give his life to Christ and his 
time to the kingdom of God. And, you 
see, you fetch him completely around 
when you do that. You have taken 
him away from the false side of his 
nature, and to the practical and moral 
side of his nature ; and for the first 
time in his life, perhaps, he puts things 
in their true place. He puts his natui ; 
in the relations in which it ought to be, 
and he then only begins to live. And 
by obedience — by obedience — he will 
soon become a learner and pupil for 
himself, and Christ will teach him 
things, and he will find whatever 



DEALING WITH DOUBT. 28/ 

problems are solvable gradually solved 
as he goes along the path of prac- 
tical duty. 

Now, let me, in closing, give a cou- 
ple of instances of how to deal with 
specific points. The commonest thing 
that we hear said nowadays by young 
men is, "What about evolution? How 
am I to reconcile my religion, or any 
religion, with the doctrine of evolu- 
tion ?" That upsets more men than 
perhaps anything else at the present 
hour. How would you deal with it ? 
I would say to a man that Christianity 
is the further evolution. I don't know 
any better definition than that. It is the 
further evolution — the higher evolution. 
I don't start with him to attack evolu 



288 DEALING WITH DOUBT. 

tion. I don't start with him to defend 
it. I destroy by fulfilling it. I take 
him at his own terms. He says evolu- 
tion is that which pushes the man on 
from the simple to the complex, from 
the lower to the higher. Very well ; 
tnat is what Christianity does. It 
pushes the man farther on. It takes 
him where nature has left him, and 
carries him on to heights which on the 
plain of nature he could never reach. 
That is evolution. "Lead me to the 
Rock that is higher than I." That is 
evolution. It is the development of 
the whole man in the higher direc- 
tions — the drawing out of his spiritual 
being. Show an evolutionist that, and 
you take the wind out of his sails. " I 



DEALING WITH DOUBT. 289 

came not to destroy." Don't destroy 
his doctrine — perhaps you can't — but 
fulfil it. Put a larger meaning into it. 

The other instance — the next com- 
monest perhaps — is the question of 
miracles. It is impossible, of course, 
to discuss that now — miracles ; but 
that question is thrown at my head 
every second day: "What do you say 
to a man when he says to you, 'Why 
do you believe in miracles ?'" I say, 
" Because I have seen them." He 
says, "When?" I say, "Yesterday." 
He says, "Where?" "Down such- 
and-such a street I saw a man who 
was a drunkard redeemed by 'he 
power of an unseen Christ and saved 
from sin. That is a miracle." The 



29O DEALING WITH DOUBT. 

best apologetic for Christianity is a 
Christian. That is a fact which the 
man cannot get over. There are fifty 
other arguments for miracles, but none 
so good as that you have seen them. 
Perhaps you are one yourself. But 
take you a man and show him a mira- 
cle with his own eyes. Then he will 
believe. 



PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. 2gi 



PREPARATION FOR LEARN- 
ING. 



r)EFORE an artist can do anything 
*~^ the instrument must be tuned. 
Our astronomers at this moment are 
preparing for an event which happens 
only once or twice in a lifetime : the 
total eclipse of the sun in the month 
of August. They have begun already. 
They are making preparations. At 
chosen stations in different parts of the 
world they are spending all the skill 
that science can suggest upon the con- 
struction of their instruments ; and up 



292 PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. 

to the last moment they will be busy 
adjusting them ; and the last day will 
be the busiest of all, because then 
they must have the glasses and the 
mirrors polished to the last degree. 
They have to have the lenses in place 
and focussed upon this spot before the 
event itself takes place. 

Every thing will depend upon the 
instruments which you bring to this 
experiment. Every thing will depend 
upon it ; and, therefore, fifteen min- 
utes will not be lost if we each put our 
instrument into the best working order 
we can. I have spoken of lenses, 
and that reminds me that the instru- 
ment which we bring to bear upon 
truth is a compound thing. It con- 



PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. 293 

sists of many parts. Truth is not a 
product of the intellect alone ; it is a 
product of the whole nature. The 
body is engaged in it, and the mind, 
and the soul. 

The body is engaged in it. Of course, 
a man who has his body run down, or 
who is dyspeptic, or melancholy, sees 
everything black, and disordered, and 
untrue. But I am not going to dwell 
upon that. Most of you seem in pretty 
fair working order so far as your 
bodies are concerned ; only it is well 
to remember that we are to give our 
bodies a living sacrifice — not a half- 
dead sacrifice, as some people seem to 
imagine. There is no virtue in emacia- 
tion. I don't know if you have any 



294 PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. 

tendency in that direction in America, 
but certainly we are in danger of 
dropping into it now and then in Eng- 
land, and it is just as well to bear in 
mind our part of the lens — a very com- 
pound and delicate lens — with which 
we have to take in truth. 

Then comes a very important part : 
the intellect — which is one of the most 
useful servants of truth ; and I need 
not tell you as students, that the intel- 
lect will have a great deal to do with 
your reception of truth. I was told 
that it was said at these conferences 
last year, that a man must crucify his 
intellect. I venture to contradict the 
gentleman who made that statement. 
I am quite sure no such statement 



PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. 295 

could ever have been made in your 
hearing — that we were to crucify our 
intellects. We can make no progress 
without the full use of all the intellec- 
tual powers that God has endowed us 
with. 

But more important than either of 
these is the moral nature — the moral 
and spiritual nature. Some of you 
remember a sermon of Robertson of 
Brighton, entitled " Obedience the 
Organ of Spiritual Knowledge." A 
very startling title! — " Obedience the 
Organ of Spiritual Knowledge." The 
Pharisees asked about Christ: "How 
knoweth this man letters, never having 
learned ? " How knoweth this man, 
never having learned ? The organ of 



296 PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. 

knowledge is not nearly so much mind, 
as the organ that Christ used, namely, 
obedience ; and that was the organ 
which He Himself insisted upon when 
He said : " He that willeth to do His 
will shall know of the doctrine whether 
it be of God." You have all noticed, 
of course, that the words in the origi- 
nal are : " If any man will do His 
will, he shall know of the doctrine." 
It doesn't read, "If any do His will," 
which no man can do perfectly ; but 
if any man be simply willing to do 
His will — if he has an absolutely un- 
divided mind about it — that man will 
know what truth is and know what 
falsehood is ; a stranger will he not 
follow. And that is by far the best 



PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. 297 

source of spiritual knowledge on every 
account — obedience to God — absolute 
sincerity and loyalty in following 
Christ. " If any man do His will he 
shall know" — a very remarkable asso- 
ciation of knowledge, a thing which 
is usually considered quite intellectual, 
with obedience, which is moral and 
spiritual. 

But even although we use all these 
three different parts of the instrument, 
we have not at all got at the complete 
method of learning. There is a little 
preliminary that the astronomer has to 
do before he can make his observation. 
He has to take the cap off his telescope. 
Many a man thinks he is looking at 
truth when he is only looking at the 



298 PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. 

cap. Many a time I have looked 
down my microscope, and thought I 
was looking at the diatom for which 
I had long been searching, and found 
I had simply been looking at a speck 
of dust upon the lens itself. Many a 
man thinks he is looking at truth when 
he is only looking at the spectacles he 
has put on to see it with. He is look- 
ing at his own spectacles. Now, the 
common spectacles that a man puts 
on — I suppose the creed in which he 
has been brought up — if a man looks 
at that, let him remember that he is 
not looking at truth : he is looking at 
his own spectacles. There is no more 
important lesson that we have to carry 
with us than that truth is not to be 



PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. 299 

found in what I have been taught. 
That is not truth. Truth is not what 
I have been taught. If it were so, 
that would apply to the Mormon, 
it would apply to the Brahman, it 
would apply to the Buddhist. Truth 
would be to everybody just what he 
had been taught. Therefore let us 
dismiss from our minds the predisposi- 
tion to regard that which we have been 
brought up in as being necessarily the 
truth. I must say it is very hard to 
shake one's self free altogether from 
that. I suppose it is impossible. 

But you see the reasonableness of 
giving up that as your view of truth 
when you come to apply it all around. 
If that were the definition of truth, 



300 PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. 

truth would be just what one's parents 
were — it would be a thing of heredi- 
tary transmission, and not a thing 
absolute in itself. Now, let me ven- 
ture to ask you to take that cap off. 
Take that cap off now, and make up 
your minds you are going to look at 
truth naked — in its reality as it is, not 
as it is reflected through other minds, 
or through any theology, however 
venerable. 

Then there is one thing I think we 
must be careful about, and that is 
besides having the cap off, and having 
all the lenses clean and in position — 
to have the instrument rightly focussecL 
Everything may be right, a~H yet when 
you go and look at the object, you see 



PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. 301 

things altogether falsely. You see 
things not only blurred, but you see 
things out of proportion. And there 
is nothing more important we have to 
bear in mind in running our eye over 
successive theological truths, or reli- 
gious truths, than that there is a pro- 
portion in those truths, and that we 
must see them in their proportion, or 
we see them falsely. A man may 
take a dollar or a half-dollar and hold 
it to his eye so closely that he will hide 
the sun from him. Or he may so 
focus his telescope that a fly or a 
boulder 'may be as large as a moun- 
tain. A man may hold a certain doc- 
trine, very intensely — a doctrine which 
has been looming upon his horizon for 



302 PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. 

the last six months, let us say, and 
which has thrown everything else out 
of proportion, it has become so big 
itself. Now let us beware of distor- 
tion in the arrangement of the reli- 
gious truths which we hold. It is 
almost impossible to get things in 
their true proportion and symmetry, 
but this is the thing we must be con- 
stantly aiming at. We are told in the 
Bible to "add to your faith virtue, and 
to virtue, knowledge, and to knowl- 
edge balance/' as the word literally 
means — balance. It is a 'word taken 
from the orchestra, where all the parts 
■ — the sopranos, the basses, the altos, 
and the tenors, and all the rest of them 
— must be regulated. If you have too 



PREPARATION FOR LL.i.wM^i. 303 

much of the bass, or too much of the 
soprano, there is want of harmony. 
That is what I mean by the want of 
proper focus — by the want of proper 
balance — in the truths which we all 
hold. It will never do to exaggerate 
one truth at the expense of another, 
and a truth may be turned into a false- 
hood very, very easily, by simply being 
either too much enlarged or too much 
diminished. I once heard of some 
blind men who were taken to see 
a menagerie. They had gone around 
the animals, and four of them were 
allowed to touch an elephant as they 
went past. They were discussing 
afterwards what kind of a creature the 
elephant was. One man, who had 



304 PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. 

touched its tail, said the elephant was 
like a rope. Another of the blind 
men, who had touched his hind limb, 
said, " No such thing ! the elephant is 
like the trunk of a tree." Another, 
who had felt its sides, said, " That is 
all rubbish. An elephant is a thing 
like a wall." And the fourth, who had 
felt its ear, said that an elephant was 
like none of those things ; it was like 
a leather bag. Now, men look at 
truth at different bits of it, and they 
see different things, of course, and 
they are very apt to imagine that the 
thing which they have seen is the 
whole affair — fcke whole thing. In 
reality, we can only see a very b'ttie 
bit at a time; and we must, I tJyu^ 



PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. 305 

learn to believe that other men can see 
bits of truth as well as ourselves. 
Your views are just what you see with 
your own eyes; and my views are just 
what I see ; and what I see depends on 
just where I stand, and what you see 
depends on just where you stand ; and 
truth is very much bigger than an 
elephant, and we are very much 
blinder than any of those blind men 
as we come to look at it. 

Christ has made us aware that it 
is quite possible for a man to have 
ears and hear nothing, and to have 
eyes and see not. One of the disci- 
pies saw a great deal of Christ, 
and he never knew Him. " Have 
I been so long time with you. 



308 PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. 

Philip, and yet hast thou not kno-wrn. 
Me?" "He that hath seen Me hath 
seen the Father also." Philip had 
never seen Him. He had been look- 
ing at his own spectacles, perhaps, or 
at something else, and had never seen 
Him. If the instrument had been in 
order, he would have seen Christ. 
And I would just add this one thibg 
more : the test of value of the differ- 
ent verities of truth depends upon one 
thing : whether they have or have not 
a sanctifying power. That is another 
remarkable association in the mind of 
Christ — of sanctification with truth- — 
thinking and holiness — not to be found 
in any of the sciences or in any of the 
philosophies. It is peculiar to the 



PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. 30/ 

Bible. Christ said " Sanctify them 
through Thy truth. Thy word is 
truth." Now, the value of any ques- 
tion — the value of any theological 
question — depends upon whether it has 
a sanctifying influence. If it has not, 
don't bother about it. Don't let it dis- 
turb your minds until you have ex- 
hausted all truths that have sanctifica- 
tion within them. If a truth makes a 
man a better man, then let him focus 
his instrument upon it and get all the 
acquaintance with it he can. If it 
is the profane babbling of science, 
falsely so called, or anything that has 
injurious effect upon the moral and 
spiritual nature of man, it is better let 
alone. And above all, let us remem- 



308 PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. 

ber to hold the truth in love. That is 
the most sanctifying influence of all. 
And if we can carry away the mere 
lessons of toleration, and leave behind 
us our censoriousness, and criticalness, 
and harsh judgments upon one another, 
and excommunicating of everybody 
except those who think exactly as we 
do, the time we shall spend here will 
not be the least useful parts of our 
lives. 



WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 



WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 



\/OUNG men are learning to respect 
* more, perhaps, than ever young 
men have done, the word " Christian. " 
I have seen the time when it was sy- 
nonymous with cant and unreality and 
strained feeling and sanctimoniousness. 
But although that day is not quite 
passed yet, it is passing. I heard this 
definition the other day of a Christian 
man by a cynic — "A Christian man 
is a man whose great aim in life is a 
selfish desire to save his own soul, who, 
in order to do that, goes regularly to 

3" 



312 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 

church, and whose supreme hope is to 
get to Heaven when he dies.". This 
reminds one of Professor Huxley's ex- 
amination paper in which the question 
was put — "What is a lobster ?" One 
student replied that a lobster was a red 
fish, which moves backwards. The ex- 
aminer noted that this was a very good 
answer, but for three things. In the 
first place a lobster was not a fish ; sec- 
ond it was not red ; and third it did not 
move backwards. If there is anything 
that a Christian is not, it is one who 
has a selfish desire to save his own 
soul. The one thing which Christianity 
tries to extirpate from a man's nature 
is selfishness, even though it be the 
losing of his own soul. 



WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN.' 313 

Christianity, as we understand it 
from Christ, appeals to the generous 
side of a young man's nature, and not 
to the selfish side. In the new version 
of the New Testament the word "soul" 
is always translated in this connection 
by the word "life." That marks a revo- 
lution in the popular theology, and it 
will make a revolution in every Young 
Man's Christian Association in the 
country where it comes to be seen that 
a man's Christianity does not consist 
in merely saving his own soul, but in 
sanctifying and purifying the lives of 
his fellow-men. We are told in the 
New Testament that Christianity is 
leaven, and "leaven" comes from the 
same root-word as lever, meaning that 



3H WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 

which raises up, which elevates; and 
a Christian young man is a man who 
raises up or elevates the lives of those 
round about him. We are also told 
that Christianity is salt, and salt is that 
which saves from corruption. What 
is it that saves the life of the world 
from being utterly rotten, but the 
Christian elements that are in it ? 
Matthew Arnold has said, "Show me 
ten square miles in any part of the 
world outside Christianity where the 
life of man and the purity of woman 
are safe, and I will give Christianity 
up." In no part of the world is there 
any such ten square miles outside 
Christianity. Christian men are the 
salt of the earth in the most literal 



WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 3 I 5 

sense. They, and they alone, keep 
the world from utter destruction. 

I want to say a word here about the 
Young Men's Christian Associations. 
Many have criticised them. They have 
been the target for a great deal of 
abuse. Many of the best young men 
have sneered at them, and turned up 
their noses at them, and denounced 
them. I am speaking with absolute 
sympathy and respect, and even enthu- 
siasm, for Young Men's Christian 
Associations. But I will turn for one 
instant upon those men who turn 
against them, and tell them that it is 
not breadth that leads them to do that, 
but what one might call the narrow- 
ness of breadth — that breadth which 



3l6 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN .' 

denounces intolerance, and which is 
itself too intolerant to tolerate intoler- 
ance. And, as some one says, it is 
easier to criticise the best thing su- 
perbly than to do the smallest thing 
indifferently. 

It is very easy to criticise the meth- 
ods and aims and men of the Young 
Men's Christian Associations. If, in- 
stead of looking on and criticising those 
who know a thing or two, those who 
think they are wiser, and that they have 
the whole truth, would throw themselves 
in among others and back them and try 
to work alongside of them, they would 
get perhaps their breadth tempered by 
earnestness and by zeal, because the 
narrow man has much to contribute to 



WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 317 

the Christian cause, perhaps more than 
the broad man. But it needs ail kinds 
of people to make a world ; it needs all 
kinds of people to make a church, and 
every type of young men a Christian 
Association ; and the greatest mistake 
of all is to have every man stamped in 
the same stamp, so that if you met him 
in a railway train one hundred miles 
off, you would know him as a Y. M. 
C. A. man. I would like to find many 
who would not wear the badge so pro- 
nouncedly, that every one should know 
them at a glance. 

There is only one great character in 
the world that can really draw out all 
that is best in man. He is so far above 
'..1 others in influencing men for good 



3l8 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 

that He stands alone. That man was 
the founder of Christianity. To be a 
Christian man is to have that character 
for our ideal in life, to live under its 
influence, to do what He would wish 
us to do, to live the kind of life He 
would have lived in our house, and had 
He our day's routine to go through. 
It would not, perhaps, alter the forms 
of our life, but it would alter the spirit 
and aims and motives of our life, and 
the Christian man is he who in that 
sense lives under the influence of Jesus 
Christ. 

Now, there is nothing that a young 
man wants for his ideal that is not 
found in Christ. You would be sur- 
prised when you come to know who 



WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 3I9 

Christ is, if you have not thought much 
about it, to find how He will fit in with 
all human needs, and call out all that 
is best in man. The highest and man- 
liest character that ever lived was 
Christ. One incident I often think of 
and wonder. You remembci, when 
He hung upon the cross, there was 
handed up to Him a vessel containing 
a stupefying drug, supplied by a kind 
society of ladies in Jerusalem, who 
always sent it to criminals when being 
executed. And that stupefying drug 
was handed up to Christ's lips. And 
we read, "When he tasted thereof 
He would not drink.' ' I have always 
thought that one of the most heroic 
actions I have ever read of. But that 



320 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 

was only one very small side of Christ s 
nature. He can be everything that a 
man wants. Paul tells us that if we 
live in Christ we are changed into His 
image. All that a man has to do, 
then, to be like Christ, is simply to 
live in iriendship with Christ, and the 
character follows. 

But it is only one of the aims of 
Christianity to make the best mei\. 
The next thing Christ wants to do is 
to make the best world. And He 
tries to make the best world by setting 
the best men loose upon the world to 
influence it and reflect Him upon it. 
In 1874 a religious movement began 
in Edinburgh University among the 
students themselves, that has since 



WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 321 

spread to some of the best academic 
institutions in America. The students 
have a hall, and there they meet on 
Sundays, or occasionally on week-days, 
to hear addresses from their profes- 
sors, or from outside eminent men, on 
Christian topics. There is no com- 
mittee ; there are no rules ; there are 
no reports. Every meeting is held 
strictly in private, and any attempt to 
pose before the world is sternly dis- 
couraged. No paragraphs are put into 
the journals; no addresses are reported. 
The meetings are private, quiet, ear- 
nest, and whatsoever student likes may 
attend them. That is all. It is not 
an organization in the ordinary sense, 
it is a " leaven.'' In all the schools 



322 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 

it is the best men who take most 
part in the movement, and among the 
schools it is the medical side which 
furnishes the greatest number of stu- 
dents to the meetings. Some of the 
most zealous have taken high honors 
in their examinations, and some have 
been in the first class of university- 
athletes. It is not a movement that 
has laid hold of weak or worthless 
students whom nobody respects, but 
one that is maintained by the best men 
in every department. The first benefit 
is to the students themselves. Take 
Edinburgh, with about 4000 students 
drawn from all parts of the w r orld, and 
living in rooms with no one caring for 
them. Taken away from the moral 



WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 325 

support of their previous surroundings, 
they went to the bad in hundreds. It is 
now found that through this movement 
they work better, and that a greater 
percentage pass honorably through the 
university portals into life. The reli- 
gious meetings, it is to be observed, 
are never allowed to interfere with the 
work of the students. The second 
result is to be seen in what are called 
university settlements. A few men 
will band themselves together and rent . 
a house in the lower parts of the city 
and live there. They do no preaching, 
no formal evangelization work ; but 
they help the sick and they arrange 
smoking concerts, and contribute to the 
amusement of their neighbors. They 



324 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 

simply live with the people, and trust 
that their example will produce a good 
effect. Three years ago they printed 
and distributed among themselves the 
following " Programme of Christian- 
ity : " — " To bind up the broken- 
hearted, to give liberty to the captives, 
to comfort all that mourn, to give 
beauty for ashes, the garment of praise 
for the spirit of heaviness." I suppose 
there are few of us with broken hearts, 
but there are other people in the world 
besides ourselves, and underneath all 
the gayety of the city there is not a 
street in which there are not men and 
women with broken hearts. Who is 
to help these people? No one can lift 
them up in any way except those who 



WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 325 

are living the life of Christ, and it is 
their privilege and business to bind up 
the broken-hearted. 

I want to urge the claims of the 
Christian ministry on the strength and 
talent oi our youth. I find a singular 
want of men in the Christian ministry, 
and I think it would be at least worth 
while for some of you to look around, 
to look at the men who are not filling 
the churches, to look at the needs of 
the crowds who throng the streets, and 
see if you could do better with your 
life than throw yourself into that work. 
The advantage of the ministry is that 
a man's whole life can be thrown into 
the carrying out of that programme 
without any deduction. Another ad- 



326 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 

vantage of the ministry is that it is so 
poorly paid that a man is not tempted 
to cut a dash and shine in the world, 
but can be meek and lowly in heart, 
like his Master. It is enough for a 
servant to be like his master, and there 
;s a great attraction in seeking obscu- 
rity, even isolation, if one can be 
following the highest ideal. 

With regard to the question, how 
you shall begin the Christian life, let 
me remind you that theology is the 
most abstruse thing in the world, but 
that practical religion is the simplest 
thing. If any of you want to know 
how to begin to be a Christian, all I 
can say is that you should begin to do 
the next thing you find to be done as. 



WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 327 

Christ would have done it. If you 
follow Christ the "old man" will die 
of atrophy, and the "new man" will 
grow day by day under His abiding 
friendship. 



THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 



THE STUDY OF THE 
BIBLE. 



WILL give a note or two, pretty 
much by way of refreshing the 
memory about the Bible and how to 
iook at it. 

First : The Bible came out of religion, 
not religion ont of the Bible. The Bible 
is a product of religion, not a cause 
of it. The war literature of America, 
which culminated, I suppose, in the 
publication of President Grant's life, 
came out of the war; the war did not 

331 



332 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE 

come out of the literature. And so it* 
the distant past, there flowed among 
the nations of heathendom a small 
warm stream, like the Gulf Stream in 
the cold Atlantic — a small stream of 
religion; and now and then at inter- 
vals, men, carried along by this stream, 
uttered themselves in words. The his- 
torical books came out of facts ; the 
devotional books came out of experi- 
ences ; the letters came out of circum- 
stances ; and the Gospels came out of 
all three. That is where the Bible 
came from. It came out of religion ; 
religion did not come out of the Bible, 
You see the difference. The religion 
is not, then, in the writing alone ; but 
in those facts, experiences, circum- 



THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 33^ 

stances, in the history and develop- 
ment of a people led and taught by 
God. And it is not the words that 
are inspired so much as the men. 

Secondly: These men were authors; 
they were not pens. Their individuality 
comes out on every page they wrote.. 
They were different in mental and 
literary style ; in insight ; and even the 
same writer differs at different times. 
II. Thessalonians, for example, is con- 
siderably beneath the level of Romans, 
and III. John is beneath the level of 
I. John. A man is not always at his 
best. These writers did not know they 
were writing a Bible. 

Third : The Bible is not a book ; it 
is a library. It consists of sixty-six 



334 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 

books. It is a great convenience, but 
in some respects a great misfortune, 
that these books have always been 
bound up together and given out as 
one book to the world, when they are 
not ; because that has led to endless 
mistakes in theology and in practical 
life. 

Fourth : These books, which make 
up this library, written at intervals of 
hundreds of years, were collected after 
the last of the writers was dead — long 
after — by human hands. Where were 
the books ? Take the New Testament. 
There were four lives of Christ. One 
was in Rome; one was in Southern 
Italy ; one was in Palestine ; one in 
Asia Minor. There were twenty-one 



THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 335 

letters. Five were in Greece and 
Macedonia ; five in Asia ; one in 
Rome. The rest were in the pockets 
of private individuals. Theophilus had 
acts. They were collected undesign- 
edly. For example, the letter to the 
Galatians was written to the Church 
in Galatia. Somebody would make a 
copy or two, and put it into the hands 
of the members of the different 
churches, and they would find their 
way not only to the churches in Gala- 
tia, but after an interval to nearly 
all the churches. In those days the 
Christians scattered up and down 
through the world, exchanged copies 
of those letters, very much as geolo- 
gists up and down the world exchange 



336 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 

specimens of minerals at the present 
time, or entomologists exchange speci- 
mens of butterflies. And after a long 
time a number of the books began to 
be pretty well known. In the third 
century the New Testament consisted 
of the following books: the four Gos- 
pels, Acts, thirteen letters of Paul, 
I. John, I. Peter ; and in addition, the 
Epistles of Barnabas and Hermas. 
This was not called the New Testa- 
ment, but the Christian Library. Then 
these last books were discarded. They 
ceased to be regarded as upon the 
same level as the others. In the 
fourth century the canon was closed — 
that is to say, a list was made up of 
the books which were to be regarded 



THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 337 

as canonical. And then long after 
that they were stitched together and 
made up into one book — hundreds of 
years after that. Who made up the 
complete list ? It was never formally 
made up. The bishops of the differ- 
ent churches would draw up a list 
each of the books that they thought 
ought to be put into this Testament. 
The churches also would give their 
opinion. Sometimes councils would 
meet and talk it over — discuss it. 
Scholars like Jerome would investi- 
gate the authenticity of the different 
documents, and there came to be a 
general consensus of the churches on 
the matter. But no formal closing of 
the canon was ever attempted. 



338 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 

And lastly : All religions have their 
sacred books, just as the Christians 
have theirs. Why is it necessary to 
remind ourselves of that ? If you ask 
a man why he believes such and such 
a thing, he will tell you, Because it is 
in the Bible. If you ask him, " How 
do you know the Bible is true ? " he 
will probably reply, " Because it says 
so." Now, let that man remember 
that the sacred books of all the other 
religions make the same claim ; and 
while it is quite enough among our- 
selves to talk about a thing being true 
because it is in the Bible, we come in 
contact with outsiders, and we have to 
meet the skepticism of the day. We 
must go far deeper than that. The 



THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 339 

religious books of the other religions 
claim to be far more divine in their 
origin than do ours. For example, the 
Mohammedans claim for the Koran — 
a large section of them, at least — that 
it was uncreated, and that it lay before 
the throne of God from the beginning 
of time. They claim it was put in 
the hands of the angel Gabriel, who 
brought it down to Mahomet, and dic- 
tated it to him, and allowed him at 
long intervals to have a look at the 
original book itself — bound with silk 
and studded with precious stones. That 
is a claim of much higher Divinity than 
we claim for our book ; and if we sim- 
ply have to rely upon the Bible's tes- 
timony to its own verity, it is for the 



340 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 

same reason the Mohammedan w.oulc? 
have you believe his book, and the 
Hindu would have you put your trust 
in the Vedas. That is why thorough 
Bible study is of such importance. We 
can get to the bottom of truth in itself, 
and be able to give a reason for the 
faith that is in us. 

Now may I give you, before I stop, 
just a couple of examples of how the 
Bible came out of religion, and not 
religion out of the Bible ? Take one 
of the letters. Just see how it came 
out of the circumstances of the time. 
The first of the letters that was written 
will do very well as an example. It is 
the ist Epistle to the Thessalonians, 
In the year 52 Paul went to Europe. 



THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 34I 

He spent three Sundays in Thessa- 
lonica, created a great disturbance by 
his preaching, and a riot sprang up, 
and his life was in danger. He was 
smuggled out of the city at night — 
not, however, before having founded 
a small church. He was unable to 
go back to Thessalonica, although he 
tried it two or three times ; but he 
wrote a letter. That is the first letter 
to the Thessalonians. You see how it 
sprang out of the circumstances of the 
time. Take a second example. Let 
us take one of the lives of Christ. 
Suppose you take the life recorded by 
Mark. Now, from internal evidences 
you can make out quite clearly how it 
was written, by whom it was written, 



34 2 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 

and to whom it was written. You 
understand at once it was written to a 
Roman public. If I were writing a 
letter to a red Indian I would make it 
very different from a letter I would 
write to a European. Now, Mark puts 
in a number of points which he would 
not if he had been writing to Greeks. 
For example, Mark almost never quotes 
prophecy. The Romans did not know 
anything about prophecy. Then, he 
gives little explanation of Jewish cus- 
toms. When I was writing home I 
had to give some little explanations 
of American customs — for example, 
Commencement Day. When Mark 
writes to Rome about things hap- 
pening farther East, he gives elab- 



THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 343 

orate explanations. Again, Mark is 
fond of Latin words — writing to the 
Latins, who could understand them. 
He talks about " centurion, " " prscto- 
rium," and others. Then, he always 
turns Jewish money into Roman money, 
just as I should say a book, if I were 
writing to Europe about it, cost two 
shillings, instead of fifty cents. Mark, 
for example, says, "two mites, which 
make a codrantes. ,, He refers to the 
coins which the Romans knew. In 
these ways we find out that the Bible 
came out of the circumstances and the 
places and the times in which it was 
written. Then if we will we can 
learn where Mark got his information, 
to a large extent. It is an extremely 



344 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 

interesting study. I should like to 
refer to Gocet's " New Testament 
Studies," where you will get this 
worked out. Let me just indicate to 
you how these sources of information 
are arrived at — the principal sources 
of information. There are a number 
of graphic touches in the book which 
indicate an eye-witness. Mark him- 
self could not have been the eye- 
wikiess ; and yet there are a number 
of graphic touches which show that he 
got his account from an eye-witness. 
You will find them, for example, in 
Mark iv. 38; x. 50; vi. 31; vii. 34. 
You will find also graphic touches 
indicating an ear-witness — as ? if the 
voice lingered in the mind of the 



THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 345 

writer. For example, the retention of 
Aramaic in v. 41 ; and in vii. 34 — 
" Talitha cumi ; Damsel, I say unto 
thee, arise." He retained the Aramaic 
words Christ said, as I would say in 
Scotland, "My wee lassie, rise up." 
The very words lingered in his ear, 
and he put them in the original. Then 
there are occasional phrases indicating 
the moral impression produced — v. 15 ; 
x. 24; x. 32. Now, Mark himself 
was not either the eye-witness or ear- 
witness. There is internal evidence 
that he got his information from Peter. 
We know very well that Mark was 
an intimate friend of Peter's. When 
Peter came to Mark's house in Jerusa- 
lem, after he got out of prison, the 



346 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 

very servant knew his voice, so that 
he must have been well known in the 
house. Therefore he was a friend of 
Mark's. The coloring and notes seem 
to be derived from Peter. There is a 
sense of wonder and admiration which 
you find all through the book, very 
like Peter's way of looking at things — 
i. 27 ; i. 33; i. 45; ii. 12; v. 42; and 
a great many others. But, still more 
interesting, Mark quotes the words, 
" Get thee behind Me, Satan," which 
were said to Peter's shame, but he 
omits the preceding words said to his 
honor— -"Thou art Peter. On this 
rock," and so on. Peter had learned 
to be humble when he was telling 
Mark about it. Compare Mark viil 



THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 347 

27-33, with Matthew's account — xvi 
13-33. Mark also omits the fine 
achievement of Peter — walking on 
the lake. When Peter was talking to 
Mark, he never said anything about 
it. Compare vi. 50 with Matthew's 
account — xiv. 28. And Mark alone 
records the two warnings given to 
Peter by the two cock-crowings, mak- 
ing his fall the more inexcusable. See 
Mark xiv. 30 ; also the 68th verse 
and the 72d. Peter did not write the 
book ; we know that, because Peter's 
style is entirely different. None of 
the four Gospels have the names of 
the writers attached to them. We 
have had to find all these things out ; 
but Mark's Gospel is obviously made 



% 

34? THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 

up of notes from Peter's evangelistic 
addresses. 

So we see from these simple exam- 
ples how human a book the Bible is, 
ana how the Divinity in it has worked 
through human means. The Bible, in 
tact, has come out of religion; not 
religion out of the Bibie, 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



029 557 464 1 



k 



